silveradept | Entries tagged with december days: the "meh" in meta

This is it! Last post.

fandom_snowflake incoming, starting tomorrow.

With commentary and notes, as I remember.

The Perfect Interview (1694 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Veterinarian For Magical Creatures - Character
Summary:
In the middle of giving an interview that she's sure will end her practice and her career, Dr. Cassandra has to treat a patient. Which might be exactly the thing she needed to grow her business instead of kill it.

Original Works are often a place where the creativity has to come out. I liked the idea of a veterinarian for Magical Creatures, and my brain helpfully provided the knowledge that such a person is likely rare in their world, and always has to deal with the possibility that they look like they're not mentally competent to anyone else. And the TV interview story went with that so that they could prove that they were quite competent, indeed.
Squiggles is a cougar in his animal form. And Pullman is a campus location for Washington State University, whose animal mascot are cougars. Meta-referential humor, hee.

What To Do With Life When You're Supposed To Be Dead (1243 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy X & Final Fantasy X-2, Final Fantasy XIII Series
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Lightning/Yuna
Characters: Lightning (Final Fantasy XIII), Yuna (Final Fantasy X & X-2)
Summary:
Training Yuna on pistols is easier for Lightning than confronting the reality that both of them are more alike than Lightning wants to admit.

rynia proposed, early on in our friendship, that the worlds of Final Fantasy VII and X are related to each other, with VII being the far future world of X (or the other way around, potentially), and I think I've always had a little bit of "Final Fantasy is a multiverse," or possibly "Each Final Fanatasy takes place on the same world, but with significant time differences between each narrative". And since the XIII series has a significant time-travel component to it with regard to Lightning, Serah, and others, it seemed like a good idea to pair up Lightning the consumate Guardian not that soon after the fall of Cocoon with Gunner Yuna who's getting used to the idea that she's defeated Sin permanently and now needs to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. I think it's pretty true to the characters.

Origin Stories (4668 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: The Tea Dragon Society - Katie O'Neill
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Greta/Minette
Characters: Greta (Tea Dragon Society), Erik (Tea Dragon Society), Hesekiel (Tea Dragon Society), Minette (Tea Dragon Society), Greta's Mama (Tea Dragon Society), Greta's Papa (Tea Dragon Soceity), Brick (Tea Dragon Society)
Additional Tags: A Story of Stories
Summary:
What starts as a question about one story needs several more stories to try and answer fully.

I loved The Tea Dragon Society as a book, and I think it's a great story for small children and adults alike. And, lucky for me, it appears that I might have written the first work in AO3 specifically about those characters (there's a crossover with Nimona that has an earlier date, so it's not the first work on the tag.). That's actually very scary, that the thing on the tag that's mine is the thing that's there. I can hope with time there will be more, and people will enjoy it. But wow, a first in something that I don't think I'd ever end up with a first involved.

Closer Together (2967 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Qrow Branwen/Ozpin/Oscar Pine, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Characters: Qrow Branwen, Ozpin (RWBY), Oscar Pine
Additional Tags: Older Oscar, Alternate Universe - Red String of Fate, background Bumblebee, Background Rose of Winter
Summary:
Three perspectives on one relationship, over time, as it becomes both two and stays the one that it always was.

There are a lot of things about writing in RWBY that start staring you back in the face if you notice them for long enough. There are remarkably few opportunities for men characters to interact with other men (and that's by design, from the looks of things), and so making a pairing that works was a bit of an exercise in writing the things that haven't been on screen. (And a little bit of judicious use of an alternate universe-style setting.) I'm pleased with how it turned out, and my recipient was, as well.

Pit Row Peril (2227 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Perils of Penelope Pitstop (Cartoon)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Penelope Pitstop, Sylvester Sneekly | The Hooded Claw, The Bully Brothers
Additional Tags: Radio Serial Narration, Interactive Narrator, Breaking the Fourth Wall, Canon-typical peril
Summary:
Our Herione, Penelope Pitstop, is at the track to observe the inaugural running of the Pitstop 500. But even though Penelope's not racing on the track, there's still plenty of peril from that dastardly villain, The Hooded Claw!

Okay, I had fun with this one. Writing for a series where the narrator is not only interactive, but has definite opinions about the things that are going on, and is voiced by Gary Owens, yeah. What I needed most for this particular work was to find a copy of the show itself so that I could be sure I wasn't remembering wrong about the style to adopt and use for the narration and the characterization. I also enjoyed getting to write a Penelope who is both competent and has a few secrets of her own.
Having free reign to let out the hurricane of puns was also really nice

Hermione Granger and the Time Turner Shenanigans (3089 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child - Thorne & Rowling
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood, Ron Weasley, Harry Potter, Delphi (Harry Potter), Neville Longbottom
Additional Tags: Time Turner (Harry Potter), Time Travel, Groundhog Day Loop, Quick Body Swap
Summary:
It's the first day of the Triwizard Tournament, and Hermione is pretty annoyed that nobody seems to have taken her advice and planning.
It's the first day of the Triwizard Tournament, and Hermione finds herself in the middle of a strange conspiracy put on by Luna for unknown reasons.
It's the first day of the Triwizard Tournament, and things seem to be going according to plan, except when they don't.
It's the first day of the Triwizard Tournament. That much is certain.

There's a certain glee that comes out whenever I get to write Luna Lovegood at her fully-weirdest, and some of that is due to the way that Evanna Lynch portrayed her in the movies, but also because the Harry Potter universe needs more harmless weird instead of the malicious weird that tends to happen to it.
I took a little inspiration from a Star Trek: Discovery episode on how to frame the main character as experiencing the time disruptions but not actually being the one to cause them, and I think it worked out well.

The Princess Games (3049 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 3/3
Fandom: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Disney Princesses
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Fa Mulan (Disney), Merida (Disney), Tiana (Disney), Ariel (Disney), Jasmine (Disney), Moana Waialiki, Belle (Disney), Kida Nedakh, Alice (Alice in Wonderland), Megara (Disney), The Gamemaker
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting
Summary:
For the 30th Hunger Games, all the prettiest girls in the Districts were reaped. But prettiest doesn't mean least intelligent, least strong, or least crafty. There's a plan (or two) afoot to try and get as many of them out alive, and embarrass the Capitol as much as possible while they're at it.

I am always on board with getting to write competent Princesses, and the Disney crew were due up for this treatment, because there are enough of them they could very easily make a Hunger Games complement all on their own. I really enjoyed the setting that I've started working with here, and so maybe if I get the opportunity to write more in that universe (or decide to do more in that universe), I've still got plenty of potential space to go.

Make Me An Offer (1125 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Original Work
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Fairy Queen/Human Girl Trapped in the Fairy Realm
Characters: Fairy Queen - Character, Human Girl Trapped In The Fairy Realm
Additional Tags: Fairy Morality, blue and orange morality, Differing Definitions of Consent
Summary:
The Queen's newest plaything took quite the journey to her current place. The Queen tells her story to the most appreciative audience.

This started with a good idea -- "What if the girl trapped in the fairy realm is murderously competent at trying to get out?" and expanded from there into a story about selling parts of yourself just to stay alive, and eventually landed in the ending. I thought the whole thing came together as a work quite nicely, even if it took a couple different attempts at the end game before I settled on the thing I actually wanted.

The Softball Seduction (3436 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Once Upon a Time (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Ginny Weasley
Characters: Hermione Granger, Luna Lovegood | Phyllis Moonchild, Ginny Weasley | Melissa Carbuncle
Additional Tags: Storybrooke full of Hogwarts Characters, Alternate Universe - In Storybrooke | Cursed
Series: Part 2 of Hermione Granger and the Storybrooke Shuffle
Summary:
Hermione makes the acquaintance of an extremely athletic redhead after her softball game. Unlike at Hogwarts, this particular version of Ginny seems more interested in her than in who she was back at school. Hermione isn't sure whether to hold off or to take the opportunity presented.

So what do you do when you get nothing for a prompt other than a pairing? You write something you're going to enjoy yourself. And since I still have this Storybrooke world kicking around, I thought I'd give it another story, since there wasn't any reason not to. Haven't received anything from the recipient about it, even at this later date, so I can only guess they didn't like it or something terrible happened to them and they're not able to comment about it at all.

Finesse and Fury (1336 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Yang Xiao Long
Characters: Blake Belladonna, Yang Xiao Long, Ozpin (RWBY), Glynda Goodwitch
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Sports, Women's Ice Hockey
Summary:
Practice for the Remnant Women's Hockey League is anything but routine for Blake. For once, though, Yang shows more than just her legendary temper.

I really enjoy the women's hockey game and am disappointed that it doesn't get television coverage outside of the Olympic hockey tournaments. In this particular case, unlike the Oscar/Ozpin/Qrow work above, it's not that hard to have interactions between Blake and Yang that can be seen as flirtatious or otherwise, but part of that is because they're on the same team. And knowing enough about their respective personalities in RWBY makes it easy to assign them hockey roles. Blake is very much a defensive wizard of poke checks and anticipating passes. Yang is always skating close to the line of how much contact is too much contact, and who plays an extrememly aggressive game in staking out her space in front of the net. The fun goes from there.

One Hour (1209 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Orville (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Gordon Malloy (The Orville), John LaMarr (The Orville), Ed Mercer (The Orville), Isaac (The Orville)
Additional Tags: Trick or Treat: Treat, escape room
Summary:
The Orville is stuck in a strange pocket of space. Gordon and John will be ready to help the ship get out, once they're done with the windstorm full of sharks.

It's The Orville, and escape rooms, and the usual sort of weirdness that's par for the course in that show. Plus, gratuitous sharknado. What's not to like?

Whose Child Is This? (1161 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Brave (2012)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Elinor/Fergus (Disney)
Characters: Merida (Disney), Elinor (Disney), Fergus (Disney: Brave), Triplets (Disney: Brave)
Summary:
The triplets want the answer to a very important question. All of the people they talk to have a definitive answer to the question. None of them agree.

I thought it might be fun to ask each of the characters involved who they think Merida takes after, and naturally, everyone thinks it's someone else (and in Merida's case, she thinks she's not like anyone else.) The triplets definitely seem to be the best characters for that role.

Better Than A Hot Stone Massage (2165 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: RWBY
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Penny Polendina/Ruby Rose
Characters: Penny Polendina, Ruby Rose (RWBY), Blake Belladonna, Yang Xiao Long, Oscar Pine, Qrow Branwen
Additional Tags: Mentioned Ilia Amitola/Blake Belladonna, Mentioned Blake Belladonna/Sun Wukong, Maybe/Maybe Not Bumblebee Because Yang's Not Telling, Cuddling & Snuggling, Crushes, Fluffy Compared To Canon, Season/Series 03 Spoilers, Season/Series 05 Spoilers, Season/Series 06
Summary:
Penny rescues team RWBY, Qrow, and Oscar from a persistent Grimm horde, but a snowstorm blocks further progress and the team has to settle into a cave for the night, bringing Ruby and Penny into closer contact than either of them would have imagined.

You might notice a bit that RWBY came up a lot this year. That's not bad, because I like the characters and enjoy writing in the universe, but it seems like I might be part of a small minority of people who are interested. I've written more than a few works for this particular recipient this year, and it's great, in so much that so far, I've been able to use different characters each time, so that I don't worry that I'm writing the same story for the same person, but I kind of worry that I'm going to end up having to do the same thing for the same person at some point if I keep matching them. Not necessarily bad, but worrying
As for the story itself, it's robot-Pinochio, who's way sweet about everything, and Red-Riding-Hood thrust into a leadership role and a lot of big decisions, who could use some downtime. And both of them have feelings they need to process about everything, which includes each other, as well. Although Ruby's going to be very reluctant to admit to anything, given the way that relationships seem to end up in the RWBY-verse, and in her family specifically.

Making Exceptions (4249 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: Calvin & Hobbes
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Calvin/Susie Derkins, Calvin/Susie Derkins/Original Characters, Susie Derkins/Original Characters
Characters: Calvin (Calvin and Hobbes), Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes), Calvin's Mother (Calvin and Hobbes), Original Characters, Susie Derkins
Additional Tags: Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie, Adult Calvin (Calvin & Hobbes), Adult Susie (Calvin and Hobbes), Polyamory, Noodle Incidents, Calvin Parenting, Parenting Calvin, Canon-Typical Hobbes Uncertainty Principle, 5+1 Things, ...if you squint
Summary:
Vignettes from Calvin's life as he grows older and discovers love and parenting, grudgingly admits that his mother might actually know something about both of those subjects, and passes on family traditions to the next generation.

There's a lot I liked about Calvin and Hobbes, and I tried to get as much of the mundanely weird into this piece as I could, which meant occasionally drawing on family traditions as well as things I created for Calvin. He always seems like the kind of person who has a story that he's telling at every moment, and it was interesting watching him try to do the same thing for another entity that he didn't know as well as himself or Hobbes.
I'll also admit to being proud of the sheer number of Noodle Incidents I was able to stuff in there, so there were plenty of things the reader's imagination would have to fill in, and that would likely be funnier or more poignant than I could do by myself.
As Yuletide goes, it wasn't as far out into the thicket as I often get, but I still think it was an excellent work and a good way to cap off the year.

Holy fork, that's a lot of material. No wonder the wordcount keeps going up each year. Here's hoping that next year produces a very nice crop of possible things, for you and me both. Join me for the snowflake challenge, or, if you're only here for the December stuff, see you next year.

Current Music: Aretha Franklin - Respect

[Welcome back to December Days. This year, thanks to a suggestion from

alexseanchai, I'm writing about writing. There are no more suggestion spaces left! It's been a fun month for everyone.]

We've been talking a lot about original creations, or things where the seed of the idea or a prompt is all someone gets, and then they create a work from that. Even when the prompt is as minimal as you can get from it. Or is just a small thing in your own head that blooms into a lot. Or a little.

When you're writing transformative works, you're borrowing bits from another story and mixing it together to create an entirely new thing, but what happens when someone creates a work, and it puts an idea in your head and you want to write not only those characters, but the specific universe that these characters inhabit. Or you want to tell that same story, but from free perspective of a different character. Or turn the story in on itself and tell it with a different idea. Or it's a lovely story in writing, and it would be even better if it was recorded as an audio production, whether with a single narrator or with a full cast taking on the roles. Or perhaps the story itself got some pictures in your head and you wanted to get them out in some other medium.

Some creators will say "Oh! You wanted to use that to write your own thing? Fabulous! Go ahead." Others are phenomenally jealous of their creations and will snarl at you for deciding to take their work and create something from it. This is also true of the creators of canons from whence the transformative works come, with the additional danger that sometimes they send out the lawyers with regard to fanworks of their own. For that reason, it's sometimes dangerous for fans to ask creators about what they think with regard to fanworks, and why plenty of signature lines make it very clear they will only be autographing official works. (That sometimes gets interesting now that some comic properties are producing blank-covered issue books, with the express intention of having a commissioned art piece by someone other than the official cover artist be the cover of that book, but that is currently an edge case.)

TV Tropes, among other places, maintains in a series of tropes lists of creators that have been enthusiastic about fanwork, this that have been not at all inclined and litigious, (or that declare anything other than their interpretation is "interrogating the text from the wrong perspective") those that have (attempted) to impose rules on what their fans can and can't do, and those who have made suggestions and requests about fanworks and where they be set, what gets used, or who the rights belong to. I'm sure there are fans that pay attention to that list when they consider what to nominate and what to write about, but I suspect much of fandom has a certain gleeful disregard for creators that try to keep too tight a control on their creations. They are often more respectful of suggestions made in a spirit of understanding and basically saying "look, we need to not confuse your work with ours. If we can do that, we're good."

There are ways, though, of letting people know and make sure that you're okay, or not okay, with the idea of people taking your works and building upon them for their own works. The transformative works statement is one of the easiest ones to lay up in your archive profile (or link to somewhere else more permanent that you want associated with your pseud). Fanlore calls it a blanket statement, and I'm sure it gets other names in other places, but the linked article has a pretty good framework for what it might look like (and examples at the end). It's a good way of stating up front what your preferences are about people reworking your material into something of their own. I like calling it a transformative works statement, because that seems to be what it's mostly about, and that way people don't necessarily get confused about what it is, like they might with something like the Creative Commons licenses (also really useful to have and know about, although they're not necessarily as fine-grained with regard to transformation as the transformative works statement).

"But wait," says the person. "If the copyright is mine when I make it, and I don't want anyone producing anything from my work, I should be able to assert my copyright and that will stop people from doing things with my work." Well...except for the parts where there are exceptions carved out in copyright for things like criticism and parody, so if someone wants to quote your work and use it to tell people what sort of terribly -ist shenanigans are going on in your work, or even just to say that they don't like your writing style and they feel they could do better, that's generally protected. As is deciding to take your work and twist it into the grotesque and the parodic, using what are clearly your characters, even if occasionally they might not use the names, and then they can do whatever they like with them, so long as the parody is clear enough. Copyright won't save you from people doing all sorts of terrible things to your work and telling you exactly what they think of you while they're at it. It won't protect you from people who you think are interrogating the text from the wrong perspective interpreting your text in all sorts of very wrong (but amusing or even erotic) ways. And the anarchic streak present in a lot of fandom is likely to exercise as much freedom as they can to make sure you know about all of it.

And while copyright is a terrible monster in the United States that guarantees it'll be three generations (or more) before anyone can legally start putting their fanfic anywhere, there's a long memory in fandom, and I suspect they're going to make absolutely certain there's an absolute flood of material, archived or otherwise, available everywhere the first day that it's legally available. (And, truthfully, it will have been there all the time, in places where it's less easy for the lawyers to find it. We hope their archives can be assimilated or transferred and kept going while they wait.)

In any case, if you're cool with remix, you should say so. If you're only cool with certain remix, you should say so. If you don't want anyone doing anything with regard to remix, say that. It will make it easier for everyone involved to make decisions about whether they're going to put in the time and effort to create something they're going to want to share with others and that they hope you'll be proud of them for making.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: Project Destati - Working Together

[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.]

Through

umadoshi, the latest in what appears to be a chain of quite a few links, came a rehabilitation program for writing injuries. These are not physical writing injuries, like stress on one's joints and parts because of typing or scribbling too much, but the mental injury, the thing that happens that makes writing difficult and painful, rather than the smooth flow that it was before.

I like the immediate framing of "a writing injury such as this happens when you take the 'shoulds' too far to heart," because those "shoulds" are always there, regardless of whether it's for what you are doing physically, creatively, sustainably, or anything else. There are a lot of "shoulds" hammering at us, and most of them have an external source that we have internalized, whether by media, by the society around, or in reaction to something that's brain or body-related that we may have little to no real control over (without specialized help in the form of medication or assistive devices, and even then, maybe not). There's a lot of advice about living your life going around that is essentially this:

There's only one thing that I know how to do well
And I've often been told that you only can do
What you know how to do well
And that's be you
Be what you're like
Be like yourself

Except that there's also those people who come up to you and say "I'd like to poison your mind / With wrong ideas that appeal to you / though I am not unkind." Or: "I'd like to change your mind / by hitting it with a rock / though I am not unkind." Which makes it harder to be yourself and to do the things that you know how to do well. Or to believe in the prospect that You Are Good Enough.

It is entirely possible to get burnt out on writing, just like any other creative endeavour. A lot of the classic cases of burnout tend to be about writing to deadlines, or, in the case of many authors who don't have publishers, doing the marketing and the selling and the table-sitting at conventions and bookstores and all the other things that are not doing the writing. Sometimes it can be a nice break to do some of those things, but it's an entire other job, and there's a reason why publishing houses exist to take those burdens off of a creator. If what you want is for someone to keep creating, it's best to get rid of or delegate the things that impede that process.

Writing rooms can exist for the purpose of closing away the outside world, even if temporarily, so as to get the creative work done. But they can also start feeling like prisons if there isn't a whole lot of output from that space and the writing blocks start to close in. Once certain things start becoming associated with a space, it can be hard to remove them or transmute them into something else. Humans are really good pattern-creators, to the point where we'll make a pattern out of nothing or random events, because our brains really hate having to admit to chaos, because chaos is, by nature, unpredictable, unavoidable, and often detrimental. If we're supposed to be able to control ourselves and our surroundings, admitting to the presence of chaos sounds a lot like defeat or giving up.

That feeling gets covered in this rehabilitation guide as well, in the part where it says you must take an enforced break from writing. Part of it is because the prohibition comes with a second prohibition that you're not allowed to talk negatively about yourself because you are taking a break from writing. It's also the insistence that the injury that happened means you have to rest before it can begin to work again. Taking a rest has become stigmatized in the States, because there's an insidious idea that a person is only useful to the society when they are producing something or doing work. Despite, we might note, that even the Being Represented by the Tetragrammaton is explicitly noted to have taken a rest for a full day after spending six doing labor (and said that his followers should do the same, and then replicate it so that the seventh year was also a time of rest.) Despite earning leave for rest while sick and leave to use do as not to constantly be at work, and labor protections to ensure the workday is "eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for whatever we want," there's a glorification and insistence that working every available moment of your time is the only way to get ahead and make sure that you have enough to eventually stop work after a few decades. Taking time to rest gets you accused of not caring enough about your career success and the success of your workplace.

The analogue of muscle repair is really a smart idea, Those who have had this injuries understand it and further understand that reinjuring yourself because you tried to do too much too soon is a really common thing that happens. And that usually means a longer stay of enforced low activity so that things can heal properly. And then, from there, a nice gradual return to full activity, keeping in mind not to try and overtax yourself and to keep your space as "should" - free as possible.

Yes, it will look like everyone else is doing more than you are (the linked song acknowledges the existence of sex) while you are waiting to get healed up, but you know? Maybe, if you're still feeling injured, it's time to catch up on your to be read pile, or watch a new series you've been meaning ti get into, or something else that will keep you engaged, even if you're not creating right then. And, slowly, the creating will return, and then all those plotbunnies can get out and be free-range.

Take care of yourselves out there.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: "Weird Al" Yankovic - Your Horoscope For Today

[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.]

A lot of fanworks comments that you'll see have a fairly positive aspect to them, highlighting the things that the commenter liked about the work, possibly quoting back some of the lines they liked the most or concepts and ideas they really enjoyed about the work. Yet, as we all know, there are also plenty of people who review works on places like Goodreads or the local newspaper columns that do not have nearly as nice a thing to say about some of the works they come across. I mentioned a few works that I was less fond of in yesterday's post. Someone looking at fanworks might come to the conclusion that we're all Polyannas who only like whatever it is we're reading and we don't talk about the ones we don't like.

To some degree, that's absolutely true. "Don't like? Don't read." is a thing in fannish circles, and that credo is helped significantly by the use of robust amounts of tagging, so that someone has a really good idea of what they're getting into before they even start with a work. No tag system is ever complete enough to totally warn someone away from a work they won't like, and sometimes there are works that are completely correctly tagged and there's no reason for a person to think they're not going to get something very much up their alley, and yet, sometimes a work fizzles. Maybe their three points of characterization don't match yours, maybe they've put the characters into a situation that you can't imagine actually happening, even by fandom logic. Maybe they've done something to one of the characters that defies canon, logic, and everything else and it throws you out of the story completely and you don't want to go back in. It happens.

And when it happens, someone we call it a learning moment about what we actually prefer in our works and go on from there, because there's still a lot more works to peruse and there's no sense in getting angry at one in a collection. Sometimes we post about it in our own space and we talk about what didn't work for us and we suggest that perhaps that's not a work that the people who have the same tastes that we do should examine. That's normal. This is fine.

But wait! The author of this particular work has indicated that they would like constructive criticism (or concrit) from people who are reading it. That's a free license to tell them all about the things we didn't like about their work and make dema--suggestions on how they could improve it to better suit our tastes as readers, right?

Not so much, no. Because there's an adjective modifying the word criticism, and as much as people think letting all their gripes out on an author is constructive, there's a lot more to it than that. The point of concrit is for someone to come away with more knowledge and technique that they can apply to improve their writing and its associated skills. For, say, someone writing a drabble, the skills might be figuring out how to make their prose more dense while lightening the number of necessary words to achieve the effect. For someone writing a sprawling epic, it might be advice on how to fold their worldbuilding into the narrative more, so that they're not taking chapter-long breaks so that an epic poem tangentially related to the story getting told can get included in the novel. And for a lot of people, it might be a suggestion or two on how to make their sex scenes sing better. (Mostly because writing descriptive sex scenes is fucking hard, as Sailor Jim will attest. (That piece is reproduced in other places around the Interwebs, if the color scheme doesn't work for you.)

More often than not, concrit is the sort of thing that you need specific space rules for to avoid it devolving into less constructive things, and because occasionally you need, as an author, to be able to accept the criticism as trying to make the work better, rather than as some sort of character attack on you or confirmation that your skills aren't actually any good and you should give up now. Our creations are personal, to greater and lesser degrees, and it's very easy to take "this work has issues" to mean "you are a terrible person." There are people who hold genuinely terrible views who can create works that aren't as terrible, because they don't involve the thing(s) that author is terrible about. There are people with socially progressive views who create things that aren't in accord with that view. The Steven Universe crew had an idea for a Gem that had racist overtones and although it never showed up on the screen (because the idea didn't make it past the process), it popped up in a book as a discarded idea. When called on it, they owned the mistake, apologized, and then set a second printing that didn't have that image in it. Constructive criticism in the abstract, even if not all of the specifics of the criticisms that might have been leveled.

It could have been uglier, and a lot of the time, if it's someone punching down, it ends up being that way. Harshing on someone's squee is a big no-no. And if it turns out that your comment scared away someone from doing something that were going to enjoy and could have found a good community from, well, friend, if you believe in hell, The Bad Place, or your karma messing with your reincarnations, it's not going to turn out well for you. One of those things I've learned about the transformative works community is that, in general, they tend to bring large, pointy objects to the party if someone starts setting themselves up as the sole arbiter of taste or decides they want to gatekeep "their" fandoms. And/or go "look at that person out there, trying to be Ozymandias. We'll leave them a nice wide berth and go have fun over here."

(There are three True Ozy so far. One by Shelley, one by Moore, and the most important, the furry one by Simpson.)

Feedback is still good. But if all you've got for feedback is the stuff you didn't like about the work, it might be better to sit on it or post in your own space. Because the sandwich suggestion of having two good things to say about it for each one that's not is still a good idea. And if you read something and can't come up with those, it's probably better to just be a hit on the counter.

Current Mood: annoyed
Current Music: Koji Kondo - World 1-1

[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.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

[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.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker - Dragon Roost Island

Yuletide is here! Which means there's an entire collection of very interesting works in small fandoms (defined as less than 1000 complete works, in English, of 1000 words or more, between fanfiction.net and the AO3 at the time of nomination) waiting for everyone to go through and enjoy. It's also a big exchange, and so figuring out how to navigate it for maximum enjoyment in limited time is definitely a thing that I am slowly learning how to do.

It looks like I ended up with four works this year, one from the main collection, and three from the Yuletide Madness collection. Since only the main one is revealed at this point, that's what we'll talk about tonight.

The Ballad of the Burgled Beats! (6950 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?, lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: The Chief (Carmen Sandiego), Carmen Sandiego, Studying Anime Girl (lofi hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to)
Additional Tags: the near future, Crossover
Summary:

A theft. A game. A mystery. When one of the most popular internet radio streams vanishes, it's a case for the detectives at Acme. When it's accompanied by a taunting message from the world's greatest thief, it's personal.

Hee. It's casefic using the cast of characters from the PBS production of Carmen Sandiego, and it's very clear that the writer enjoyed that series as much as I did. I liked the caper and what got stolen (and the handwave of how, exactly, Carmen managed it). If you're allergic to puns, though, you might have to pass on it, because there's a goodly amount of them and they are all well-deployed. The twist involved is really great, as well, so go ahead and read it.

And, so far, I've gotten good feedback from the recipient of the gift I gave, so I'm happy that this has turned out well again for this year. Without divulging specifics about what I wrote (because that's not kosher until reveals), I will say that this year's work involved a certain amount of stop-start on trying to bring something together into a unified whole, before settling into the form that it ultimately took, which I think played to the source material's strengths and storytelling style. I also believe it was ultimately true to the characters that I know and enjoy, while taking into account the necessary bits of expansion on the canon that would be needed to tell the story the recipient was interested in. The biggest bump that I had to get over in that segment was figuring out how to get each of the various parts of the plot to tie into the overarching theme. I think some of that frustration ended up being channeled through one of the characters, and turned out to produce a pretty significant amount of the wordcount by essentially transcribing the argument I was having internally, once that argument had finished and I had a direction of where to go from there. Sometimes the planning process makes it into the final material, if you can find a way of making it work.

Happy Yuletide, everyone. It's usually the final project/exchange of the year for me, so there aren't likely to be any more reveals, but there is likely to be an "AO3 output" post up and ready once author reveals happen for this year, so that I can put this final work into the list of things that I did this year. The statistics are still pretty good in terms of raw word output for this year, from what I can track, so that's nice to see.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: hip hop radio - beats to relax/study to

[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.]

There are a lot of sex and gender-tropes that follow fanworks around that have and are variously associated with other genres and media. Romance novels often have a public perception of being erotica that's acceptable to the society around it, anime and manga both deal with the perception that their works are all tentacle porn, and then further stereotypes about the various genre forms of Boys' Love and Girls' Love (not usually mentioning, say, josei or other related forms, because of the lack of exposure), furry culture has to incessantly deal with the perception that it only cares about explicit works, there's a severe gendering of media genres and properties, such that there's a widespread belief, despite multiple debunkings, that boys aren't interested in properties starring girls, and girls shouldn't be welcome or couldn't possibly be full and true members of various fandoms, because that genre/story/form isn't for girls. (Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS is a parody, Gamergate is far too serious about it.)

If you want a particularly illustrative example of how things got twisted horribly around, you can follow Anne Gilbert's 2015 article in Transformative Works and Cultures about defining bronies, which pays attention to the ways in which the definition of a brony is about non-normative ideas around gender and sexuality, how cultural perceptions of what's for boys, girls, men, and women get strongly entangled in trying to define bronies, and about how those ideas get put into practice in ways that largely step on the intended audience of the show and privilege brony comfort in regard to traditional masculinity, rather than striking out on their own to establish a space more compatible with the intended goals and audiences for the show.

(Another reason for anonymity and pseudonymity is to be able to participate, even though that sometimes means that toxic people try to get back in under another name and continue to be themselves. Tradeoffs, the need for effective space moderation, etc.)

Transformative fanworks, even in their early stages, carry the idea that they're about transgressive ideas, and most of the ideas culturally considered transgressive in the United States have to do with sexuality and gender expression. It's telling, in a lot of ways, that the interracial kiss that made it to screen essentially needed to hide behind the idea that a character wasn't in control of themselves. It's also telling that the idea that the male leads of the show having a romantic relationship couldn't similarly hide behind the fact that one of them was an alien and therefore could have had any number of ideas about what constituted an appropriate relationship. Especially since a Vulcan would not, ideally, bring emotional content into it. But media is always a mirror to the culture that produces it, and the culture didn't have the space for that idea.

If transformative fanwork is always going to be transgressive, even if only against the canon establishing what happened, then it shouldn't be a surprise that a large amount of works are going to embrace that transgressive space. And with that comes the perception that transformative works are M/M relationships (slash) written by women who are specifically looking to write their own sexual fantasies on those men. Which is, of course, an entirely separate category from fanworks devoted to transforming women characters into pinup art (assuming they aren't already improbably proportioned) and/or writing pastiche where a character is very clearly getting into (hetero)sexual exploits that will make the other men jealous, but with enough of the serial numbers filed off that the lawyers can't claim that you're writing a specific character into those contexts without the permission of the author. Or the category of adult films that are explicitly parody works (and thus protected from the lawyers), almost always directed by men, that use those characters (and sometimes even the names) and put them in unmistakably sexuality explicit situations, making sure that it's an extremely male-gaze framing the entire way through.

There's also an..."interesting" additional facet that's probably at least as old as the Hays Code, if not older, but that's starting to show up in the post-Hays, post Comics-Code landscape and is moving with the same speed at which societal space is allowing queer people to exist in non-media roles. The Premise, such that it was, couldn't get a whole lot of frank discussion airtime. If we fast forward, though, into a world where relationships between men are not immediately universally condemned and that there isn't an immediate requirement to Bury Your Gays or have them meet untimely ends for their gayness, you end up with situations where the author has accidentally or intentionally put a story line together where it looks for all the world that certain characters are very much going to be queer and have queer relationships, only for the story to shout "no homo!" and introduce a heterosexual relationship or to have one of the potential participants disappeared or killed.

One of the most formative experiences of queerbaiting for the current generation was when the very clear, textually-supported love story between Remus and Sirius was abruptly derailed by the narrative pairing Remus with Tonks instead. This wasn't new, in the sense that nobody else had been queerbaited before, but it was one of the first times it happened in an extremely popular series where a much bigger acceptance of queer people and queer culture (comparatively, anyway...), connectivity, community, and the World Wide Web made it a much bigger "WHAT." that was heard around the world than it might have otherwise been. (I have other thoughts about that post, but they're not germane to this idea. Many thanks to

marginalia for posting the thing, even though I'm recontextualizing it a lot here.)

The spectre of sexuality and gender identity hanging around transformative works is not solely Rule 34 or the presence of a lot of queer people, though, because fanwork often gamers a reputation of being predominantly about explicit sex acts (or the closest you can get and still display on your booth, possibly with the actually explicit work tucked into the browsing folder (appropriately warned for, of course)) and that fanwork is the place you go when you desperately want characters to hook up and the show itself isn't going to go there. Some of that can be blamed on Standards and Practices, or creators trolling their audiences, but even with the increased amount of content being created and delivered solely on subscription streaming services, it doesn't seem like they're taking advantage of the significantly looser rules about sex and sexuality as much as they are about language and violence. What's part of media is always a mirror to the culture that produced it, even when in a space where media itself had a much bigger possible space to play in (and is trying to monetize that space by offering exclusive content that can't be found anywhere else.)

There are always exceptions. Steven Universe, for example, is a hella queer show that flat-out flaunts the fact that the Crystal Gems are aliens with no real concept of gender or sexuality like humans are to get stuff past the radar (Well, not really: the creators of Steven Universe often work hand-in-hand with Standards and Practices at Cartoon Network to know what they can actually get away with depicting) that they would otherwise have the Moral Guardians breathing fire at them for daring to corrupt a young child's brain with the idea that queer people exist and can have healthy, happy lives. Friendship Is Magic has clearly started some interesting conversations about what defines masculinity and whether it's kosher to enjoy a show that's aggressively targeted at little girls. (Admittedly, that discussion is tangential to what FiM is actually about, as noted in the Transformative Works piece linked earlier.)

But for the most part, if you're looking for mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors, there's not much to choose from in the canon of a lot of really good works that matches your experiences. Or that admits and explores what the real consequences would be of a character having the backstory that they're supposed to have. Or wants to know what happens when those characters awaken into sexual beings and then have to deal with those complicating facets of reality instead of having them glossed over or the characters spending an episode or a chapter suddenly making decisions of the relationships they are going to embark upon, which will never be spoken of again or otherwise changed because the canon isn't listening to you la la la la.

I'm not sure I've actually given any answers or suggestions about the truth regarding the perception or ways to make that perception go away if it's an unwarranted one. I'm not sure it's unwarranted or false, given the space that's been sketched out for transformative works to play in, but I think it's incomplete if the idea doesn't include an awareness of how little space is covered by the canon, and the ways in which that space often is in tight orbit around very specific cultural norms and ideas about what is "default", what is acceptable, and where the boundary between the fringe and Here Be Dragons territory is. Make of it what you will. I'm interested in hearing your thoughts on the matter, too.

Ultimately, if you want to create smut, create smut. If you don't, don't. And nobody should make judgment of you about who you are based on whether you do or don't. Although, we do ask that you share your good stuff, regardless of your choices. Or perhaps participate in when it rolls around again.

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: Avenue Q - The Internet Is For Porn

[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.]

After everything is packaged up, pinch hits arrived, and the collection for an exchange opens up, there's usually an enforced period (most of the time, seven days) where the works are available for everyone to read, but the authors of those works are unrevealed. I suspect that if I go digging into the fan lore, I will find as many stories for the reasons why as I will find people telling them. (Fanlore, the project, mentions the anonymity part by not necessarily the reasons why in their article for a gift exchange.) The most common reason that I can think of for the presence of an anonymous period is something we talked about in an earlier post - the presence of the pseud of someone Big might skew the numbers particularly hard because of the popularity of the person, rather than the strength or otherwise of the story. I guess seven days is an easy time to remember, and theoretically gives someone enough time to walk their way through a collection and leave comments before they know who it is that's written a thing. Plus, the seven day period, at least on AO3, also means that a work doesn't show up in your collection of works, so it won't trigger any notifications to someone who might be subscribed to you as a writer, and that might make it easier to preserve the identity of the author, at least for that anonymous period, by preventing a fan with a subscription from blaring out to the Web at large that "zOMG [This Person] made a new work and it's a wonderful, great thing!" and drawing the crowds. Enough time for a recipient to read and enjoy to themselves, and anyone else who is watching the collection or has participated in the exchange so that they get a first crack at the works inside. I personally like that AO3, during the anonymous period, will still let you reply to any comments that you receive, but will obscure you as "Anonymous Creator," which will then revert to your pseud when the anonymous period is over, so that way people who might be shyer as themselves can participate in feedback and thanks for their work before anyone knows who the person is.

Of course, as a person who's not a Big Name Fan, and who doesn't know at all who any of the Big Name Fans are (because I'm basically not In Fandom enough to know and have read all the works, even for shows I like and write for), that gives me the advantage of not getting any more nervous than usual if someone comes across the radar who is a Big Name Fan or otherwise. (Plus, I like meta and discussion and worldbuild and those sorts of things, which is probably a holdover from the curatorial fandom interactions that I've been mostly involved in the past, rather than diving in headfirst into the transformative aspects to take a character or relationship and stretch it and give it a new suit and otherwise just play for the hell of it, canon be fragged if it's not useful in the pursuit of the idea.) I guess it gives me a sort of Beginner's Mind, in that I'm writing to satisfy myself and to produce something that's to the prompter's taste, and I don't actually know what I'm doing enough to worry about the reputation of the person I'm writing for. Even if it does mean that occasionally, I keep getting the same person to write for because we share certain fandoms and the algorithms decide to keep pairing us up. (That's a thing I should do some research on -- I'm guessing the sorting and matching algorithms have documentation associated with them, and that perhaps careful study of the documentation will let me look at how an exchange is shaping up and guess which of my offers I'm likely to match on. And possibly guess about which offers will land matches.)

I also wonder if the tradition of anonymity has to do with wider societal traditions around anonymity and publishing. Gifts that have the "Secret Santa" tradition, for example, where people are randomly assigned others and then have to figure out what they would enjoy and get them a gift(s) for the duration of the gifting period, without revealing themselves as the gifter. It's a bit easier in a fandom exchange, or in a prompt call, or otherwise, because a person is putting forth what they like and want up front to the person that will be writing them the gift. It occasionally happens that you do have to ask questions of your recipient, and that is usually facilitated through the moderators of the exchange, who will ask the real question in a series of plausible one, based on the information provided in the sign-up, so as not to tip off the recipient about what their gift might look like.

There's also the rich tradition of pseudonyms in publishing. Names that sound like women get gender-neutralized or masculinized for particular genres because there's a perception that the fanboys wouldn't read work by a woman. (Or, in some ways, neutralized or feminized for genres where the fanboys expect that the entire audience is women and they won't read anything that isn't by a woman.) Some authors adopt a pen name because they don't necessarily want confusion between one genre and another. So J.D. Robb appears to write various procedurals, while Nora Roberts continues to write romances, and that way the romance fans don't pick up an In Death book expecting it to be a romance, and the mystery fans don't get prejudicially dismissive because a romance writer is trying her hand at a different genre. It's easier to market that way, even if the person behind both of those series is one and the same. Stories about folkloric and fey creatures don't get mixed with the post-zombie apocalypse thrillers. Some creators are more open about their pen names than others are, and sometimes what was being written can also factor into the decision about whether or not that name gets known. Being published in Playboy, for example, might be a great thing for one author and a thing that brings the Moral Guardians down on another.

Fanfiction has its roots in anonymity, too. When we research the history of The Premise, that's what we see, an anonymizing of the idea itself, because saying openly "We think Jim Kirk and Spock might have a romantic relationship" would have consequences from the curatorial fans (and possibly the creators and editors of the magazines where that discussion would have taken place). I suspect more than a few of those stories, and the ones that followed, in print and on-line, have plenty of pseudonymous authors in their ranks, because it isn't safe to be queer, kinky, or both, in a lot of places, in a lot of times, and it isn't safe to write things that might offend your community's standards if they knew it was you. In the same way that certain people who are charged with the care and education of children find themselves, either by contract or otherwise, essentially bound to the idea that they're not allowed to be adults and do adult things in any place where children (or their parents) might observe them. Hell forbid that someone be able to separate their job from their personal life and not have the two bleed over in incredibly messy ways if there aren't precautions taken.

(That, by the way, is the only thing that stuck in my head about the otherwise forgettable movie Varsity Blues. The human maturation teacher at the high school of the main character is also apparently employed on evenings and weekends at the local strip club, where her on-stage burlesque and strip-tease act is of a naughty teacher. I couldn't suspend my belief on that, even as the high school student I was, because I cannot fathom any teacher working a strip club anywhere near the school she taught at, for the prime reason that her students might see her and how that would eventually filter up to the principal and the teacher would likely be fired under a "moral turpitude" clause or just by being run out by the conservative community's hypocritical call for her dismissal.)

I think it would be an interesting research project to discover the origins of widespread exchange anonymity, and the reasons why it has become such a staple of the exchange community that nobody blinks twice at the idea of having to wait a week (or longer) to find out who wrote them their best. fic. ever. If you know, or have insight, I'd love to hear it. Or anything else you might have to say about it. Anonymous comments are on, of course (as they usually are.)

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Madness - Our House

[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.]

The various canons of our fanwork experience fall into a couple of different categories: canons that have finished all of the various iterations they are going to go through, with no foreseeable plans to revisit those worlds, and canons that are ongoing and that can shift radically between episodes, depending on the content of whatever just came out.

For example, the first season of Steven Universe presents a particular view, and then the second season upends it, the third season pulls a table flip, the fourth season pulls the rug out from under the table, and the fifth season reveals a trapdoor that's always been underneath the table and the rug the whole time. And it's not done yet, so there's entirely the possibility that there's a whole alternate dimension in that trapdoor that we haven't seen the first glimpse of.

This poses an interesting question: At what point in the canon do you start creating fanworks? There's at least one argument of waiting until the whole thing is done so that you know what it will take to align a work to the canon (or give the canon the finger and hive off in another direction), but for ongoing series, especially ones that produce at the Steven Universe rate, that could mean entire decades going by without any works appearing as everyone waits for the whole thing to get done. And humans, again, are not very good at waiting.

Does the same argument apply to works that have completed their run? Do you need to have read/seen/experienced the entirety of the canon before going into fanworks? What if your canon is a soap opera that's been going on for fifty years? Or a police procedural of some sort that's gone on for sixteen seasons? Or a comic-book character started by a couple of Jewish guys at least 75 years ago? That's a lot of investment to put forward before creating any fanworks, and it might discourage someone from creating if they have to go through the whole thing first. Comics continuities are headache-inducing, especially...and a lot of the issues that exist might be rather expensive to find, since entire runs don't always make it to the trade paperback form where they have a bigger shot of existing later on in time.

Not to mention, the idea that you have to experience the whole thing before you can start smacks of the curatorial fandom, the kind that knows the things that make them killer on trivia nights, but also that tends to think the accumulation of canon and their various accoutrements is the highest form of fandom that a person can perform. It's not for nothing that the Comic Book Guy of The Simpsons is a recognizable archetype in many fans' lives. It's also unsurprising that Comic Book Guy is nearly-universally a negative stereotype of fandom because of his obsession with curation and minutiae.

Fanworks are generally inherently transformative in small and large ways. They take what's already been there and imagine new scenarios, tweak the characterizations, make textual what is subtextual, fix perceived and actual flaws, small and large, and otherwise change the thing into something that is better for the creator than what is already present in the canon. "If every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs," is how the Steven Universe people put it, and we'll set aside all the things about how the sausage gets made in this particular point. If the canon were perfect, we'd have a lot fewer fanworks. If the canon were perfect, it would somehow manage to encompass everything that the fans of the show could think of. That's an impressive haul, and even more difficult to achieve the more fans a canon gets.

Which brings us back to the question posed in the subject. At what time during a work is it fair game for fanworks? I'm sure that there are some people who have all sorts of ideas from episode one, chapter one, or track one. Some of them will probably be squashed by what happens by the end of the work, but there's nothing inherently wrong with wanting to write from the beginning. How much of going before it's all done means the possibility of having your work ending up as alternate universe through no fault of your own? Is that a bad thing, necessarily? (Not really.) Is episode one a good place to start with, or do we want to say that a full season is best? Or watching the movie all the way through, or reading the book all the way through? The more canon that gets absorbed in, the fuller the development of the characters involved, and so you might get a better set of points for your Three-Point Characterization anchors. Or there might be a delightful idea waiting at the end that you have to get through the whole thing to develop fully.

A useful rule of thumb might be "if you've absorbed enough canon that an idea strikes, that's enough canon to do the work with." Tagging it appropriately might help ward off people who see a different character because they've seen more canon, or help them to figure out how you got from point A to point B based on how much of the source you've seen. And I know there are people who are entirely fascinated by (and might enjoy doing longitudinal studies of) the ways in which works change (or resist changes) as more of the canonical material gets released over time. More material produces more ideas and more possibilities, even as it prunes others away or requires a fanwork creator to provide a convenient excuse or handwave or alternate-universe transport device or methods. As with many of these posts, while it sounds like I have a definitive idea, I really don't, and I'm curious to hear what you have to say about how much is enough, if there ever is an enough.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Toari Amos via Florence and the Machine - Sunflower Girl

[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.]

Putting a work out into the world is a scary thing. There's been a lot of confidence expended in the writing part, in getting it complete, in getting it looked after and shaped into what the final thing will be, and then getting enough put together to push the post button and actually let it live somewhere that someone can see it. (And, hopefully, enjoy it.)

Then comes the waiting part, and frankly, humans are still rubbish at waiting. It's part of the reason why there are exchanges and fests and prompt calls and kink memes and all sorts of invitations to creativity happening all the time. That way, when something is done, you can dive into the next thing without having to worry about how the last thing is going to be received all the time. For traditionally published authors, I'm pretty sure they're already hip-deep in the next book by the time the current book actually gets officially published. Deadlines and all of that.

Sometimes, you post a work, and it's exactly what the fandom is looking for at that time, and there's a lot of activity and kudos and comments and recommendations, sometimes even with a bit of a long tail of those things as the fandom happily chats for a bit about what kind of work it was and the things they enjoyed about the work. I've managed that...once, I think.

Some works are very nice and appreciated by their fandom and get some residual things here and there as people are combing through the archives of a fandom or are looking for the kind of story that you've put down for them. I have a few of those pop up here and there, and it can be rather charming to have a kudos note or a new comment on a work that's years old. (Charming, hah. I love it when that happens, let's be honest.) Sometimes you are on the long tail, and the people that get out that far to you enjoy the work, but it's not going to be anything more than the long tail.

And then there are some works that you put out there, that you enjoyed writing and think are good, but because you're not a Big Name Fan, or a published author pseud, or someone with a remarkably large lot of followers to provide feedback and appreciation, or you're writing outside the genre or fandom that you're known for, they just...sit. I've got a few of those, too.

Some of it is because I'm writing for a small fandom that's unlikely to ever get any larger, which might mean all the people in that fandom went "it's a new work!" and read and enjoyed it and left their feedback and there's nobody else who necessarily is going to go looking there. Sometimes it's one fic in a megafandom that gets a blip on the dash and then disappears into the aether without having received any real time in the sun. (Another reason I like writing for exchanges, I realize -- there's a guaranteed audience of one, at least.)

Given how many tools get built in for external feedback, like comments and kudos and hits, it's easy to mistake external feedback for a judgment of worth on the work. If a work doesn't gather much for external feedback, does that make it worthless?

Nah. We explored some in the last post about how a large amount of audience fit a given work are lurkers that won't actually do anything but enjoy the work, and who tick the hit count up with their presence, but that's it. And for each step of greater interactivity, a significant portion of the audience falls off - some will touch the kudos button but nothing more, some might kudos it and recommend it somewhere else, and only a few would leave a comment. Each comment might represent many others who thought the same thing, but didn't actually type anything.

It's dangerous to believe that the external feedback is the only thing to gauge worth by. Each time you finish writing, you've engaged in a process of practice and skill-building that makes you a better writer. And the thing you're posting is something that you presumably liked enough to want to share it with others. I think this is what

jenett was getting at in comments on an earlier entry about how even a fandom of one might have others who will be delighted to know that something exists, and realize that it was a thing they didn't know they wanted to exist until that point of reading. Or are delighted to see that someone has posted something in this small fandom they've always been interested in. It might not generate any feedback, but maybe it inspires someone else to start or continue their own creative journey. Or your fic might get them to start watching or reading the canon (and possibly be disappointed in the canon itself, but that's not your fault).

The feedback is nice, don't get us wrong. Please do give feedback. But if there isn't any, it doesn't mean the work is a failure. You Are Still Good Enough. More often than not, that's a thing I have to tell myself, because there's always a part of me that wants to say if it's not as good and wildly popular as someone else (often whatever clearly very popular, well-kudoed and well-commented work happens to be in the same fandom) work, then it's not good. (Brains, friend.)

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: John Williams - Duel of the Fates

[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.]

Interaction between creators and their fans has always been somewhat regulated. In live media and performances, the stage (and sometimes the attendant bodyguards) are there to make sure the creator and the fans don't interact with each other in too personal a way. In recorded and telebroadcast matters, the creators and the fans might only see each other at panels, conventions, and the like, and even then, there's still the stage-audience distinction. Essentially, the creator gets to choose how much interaction they want to have with the fandom. (And the fandom gets to do the same. I suspect there are more than enough creators out there who have been shunned by the fandom for their works for awful behavior or not knowing when to leave well enough alone or other things. Death of the Author is definitely a thing in fandom.

A lot of the fans of a work or creator are content to consume and enjoy the material and not really feel like they need to say anything about it. Lurkers exist for everyone, and it's a relatively safe and anonymous way of doing your fandom. There nobody to say that your reading is wrong or against the grain or otherwise try to gatekeep you or tell you why you couldn't possibly fit their impossible definitions of Proper Fandom. (But seriously, Fuck Those Guys. Not literally.) Sometimes you end up as a lurker in a fandom because there's an outsize group that's incessantly toxic and taking up all the public space and oxygen in the discussion area. So much so that the creators make a character specifically for the purpose of making fun of those fans, and they get Patton Oswalt to voice him.

As I was saying. Lurkers exist, and for many works and creators, the lurkers would like to participate meaningfully, but they don't feel like they can create something that expresses their feelings or enjoyment or thinking that a work helped them do. This is another space where You Are Already Good Enough applies, but also the Ira Glass segment about taste and practice. The kudos system, or something similar, allows for a low-pressure interaction to signal "hey, I liked this!" There aren't any details attached, but kudos at least show a registering of a like or enjoyment.

Kudos are a bit difficult to gauge, though. Seanan McGuire's panel at GeekGirlCon this year mentioned that after the anonymity period of an exchange like Yuletide, her kudo count skyrockets on a work because now it's attached to the pseud(onym) of someone very famous. The implication was "we read and like this because Seanan wrote it, not necessarily because it's good in its own merits." (Being Seanan, though, I suspect it is good on its own merits.) I'm sure there are metrics that creators use to gauge the popularity of their work by counting interactions versus hits (which are also imprecise counts), and that the ratios are different for each one.

Bookmarking can sometimes be an indicator of something, if the bookmarks can be differentiated between "Things I want to read" and "things I recommended", as AO3 does. I suspect a lot of recommending gets done away from that platform, and so it's not easy to capture, unless you happen to be subscribed to someone doing the recommending, or one of your people is also one of their people and points you at it. So that's not as useful a thing as I thought it might be when I started.

So if lurkers never say hi, kudos can sometimes get skewed, and recommendations happen mostly out of my sight, then there's really only one form of interaction, as a creator, that I can rely on for people to tell me what they think about the work -- comments. And comments are the scariest form of interaction for a pretty significant number of fans.

Comments make it possible for a dialogue to start between creator and fans, and if it's someone that you like and want to like you, it's like trying to make a new friendship. The potential for awkward and embarrassing things is really high, there's a certain amount of worry that you're going to trip over your own words, or worse, the words are going to fly away completely, and it's entirely possible that what you say will be taken negatively, even though it wasn't meant that way, and the whole interaction will fall apart. It that you'll speak up and there will be silence from the other end. No acknowledgement, no thanks, not even a form letter in reply.

With as much potential for disaster as there is, it's a wonder there are any comments at all. Beyond that, though, there's also the part where you have to translate all the feels into something relatively coherent. There's certainly a place for "asdfghjkl FEELS OH WOW FEELS AWESOME." kinds of comments, but creators like it a lot more when you can talk about the specifics of what's giving you the feels. Because it's nice to know whether we've found the character's voice correctly, or whether the action flows very nicely, or if a particular line has all the feelings wrapped up in it. Sometimes we even try for those moments to happen, and we want to know whether it's landed correctly for the audience, or even just for the person who the work was written for. Without comment feedback, it's very hard to know what happened when someone was reading. And for commenters, that sometimes means having to learn an entirely new set of words and descriptions and use them correctly.

So, commenting is definitely a learned skill.

dawnfelagund talks about what environmental and personal factors are in play when people do or don't comment, with statistics of a particular sample, for example, and acknowledges that the way we do fandom sometimes prioritizes some forms of interaction over others, and sometimes certain platforms make it easier or harder to participate in that fandom, or using a particular expression of participation. A platform that focuses on ease of kudos and reposting lowers the barrier to entry and makes it easier to build an identity without having to necessarily do a lot of writing yourself, for example.

Also, tools can sometimes help reduce the cognitive barrier.

longlivefeedback recently unveiled a comment builder application, using macros and data contributed from the community to allow someone to type the things they're experiencing, or copy in particular lines and paragraphs from a work and build a comment about what makes those parts standout. The application itself intends to be a scaffold, taking care of a lot of the cognitive load of building the frame of the comment and allowing someone to then customize the internals and the finished product before posting it in.

momijizukamori posted the announcement a few days ago, and it was a conveniently-timed thing, given the exodus of Tumblr users to more fan-friendly spaces, and the subsequent adjustment to a new style of interaction. I'm not sure the comment builder will help with posts on Dreamwidth, unless it's a fic post, but skills learned and scaffolded for one purpose often translate into another setting, so comment skills learned in giving feedback for fic can be put to use leaving feedback for other works, too.

You're good enough, and creators (usually) like feedback, and there's a community that's easier to build if less people are lurkers, including building one that wants to push back against toxic elements. There are tools available to help you craft and start and finish your comments. And like everything else, it will take practice before your skills are up to your taste. Please leave comments, if you want to.

Current Mood: artistic
Current Music: The Vince Guaraldi Trio - Skating

[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.]

...although I'm not actually all that good at it, myself. I mean, I know the shape of something like hurt/comfort or angst or fluff, but that doesn't necessarily mean I can spot it in my own work when it comes time to post.

Let's back up a bit. I'm a taxonomist by trade -- even though I'm not in the official position of creating records or assigning collections and classifications to all the things I look after, I'm still very invested in the idea and the business of grouping things together in useful ways that make them easier to find later. (Except my link posts, which really don't have specific tagging and I rely on being able to search back in my own journal for specific things where warranted.) I have occasionally joked that if I were to be transformed into an RPG character, I would receive huge bonuses to bring able to find something, so long as it was arranged in some sort of deducible order.

I admit my own classification system, such that it is, may not make sense to anyone else, and it probably has a lot to do with brain (mis)function coping that wants to keep active things in sight so they don't get forgotten, but I was still able to reason my way through finding where I had put something, so that was good.

In any case, at least while I was studying it, there were a couple ideas in mind about classification, and they mostly depended on where, if anywhere, the authority came from. Taxonomies often have a central authority governing what language gets used, how the classification gets applied, where it has scope, and how it gets represented. They are formal structures and they admit change fairly slowly and methodically, when needed. Things like the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual or the Dewey Decimal Classification are taxonomic.

Some of the Archive of Our Own runs on taxonomies, too - there are the canonical versions of fandoms, pairings, tropes, and so forth. Those get decided by various moderators and tag wranglers so that there's one standard tag that applies to all works that fit the definition of the tag described. One of the best things about having taxonomic classification is that it makes things way easier to search, assuming you know the correct vocabulary to use, and you have a higher degree of confidence you find everything under that definition.

Of course, humans don't think in taxonomic terms a lot of the time. We often use imprecise words in our normal conversations. Things like "bugs", which usually mean anything in the phylum Arthropoda, regardless of whether they are true bugs, arachnids, lepidopterans, or other creatures. "Bugs" share certain characteristics of size, multiples of legs, and creep factor, though, which is why they persist as a supergroup outside of the formal Linnean taxonomy. These sorts of imprecise categorizing make image searching, natural language processing, and a host of other things that are common and intuitive to humans absolutely frustrating to computers (if computers could currently express human emotions spontaneously or intelligently) and to searchers alike. The human and the computer can't understand each other. Garbage in, garbage out. Except the human expects the computer to understand them and stops giving eyeballs to advertisers when that doesn't happen.

In steps "folksonomy," although there may be a newer term for it, which is essentially meant as a companion to the official taxonomy that helps make those intuitive (to humans of the same experiences) connections and links together things that may not seem to be related at the time, or whose relationships exist outside the official taxonomy. Tags are generally folksonomic, even if some of them end up forming or joining the taxonomy because the authority on charge of the taxonomy sees the pattern and decides to standardize it. Even for things that might only loosely fit to the pattern established, just so that it's all grouped in a single place. Because tags are definitely the space where someone wants to get everything all at one click.

Between the taxonomy and the folksonomy, in theory, should be a system that works well enough for humans that they can find what they want by using whatever language they have to hand. In theory. Because humans are interesting creatures and always come up with new and inventive ways of naming things.

So, if you would like maximum visibility for your work when you post it to a place, archive, site, or otherwise, tag your work appropriately so that it may be sorted into the appropriate buckets. AO3 has certain mandatory tags regarding Archive Warnings, for example, and there are review processes in place to make sure those tags get applied properly, either by the creator or by someone who takes the time to go "hey, this thing should be tagged with this!" because they don't want anyone else reading the thing without warnings. Beyond the mandatory tags, though, various plot elements, tropes, alternate universes, structural elements, spoiler status, and the occasional joke tag all get applied so as to make the work more descriptive to the person potentially interested in investing time in it. Or, for that matter, knowing that a work is going to stand on their toes, their triggers, or their squicks. Warning someone away is as valid a use of tags as drawing them in.

Please, tag your work appropriately, and see if there are other tags that might apply if you're not sure there are enough descriptors to go with your work. The people who are organizing, indexing, and eventually making things available for searching will thank you a lot for doing this valuable part beforehand. It will help confused people like me get a better grasp of what tags to apply to my own work for the same purposes.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Koji Kondo - Great Fairy Fountain (Orchestrated Ver.)

[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.]

This might be a personal thing, limited only to me, but it's something that I continue to deal with in regard to all of the exchanges that I participate in, so maybe it is something that other people deal with as well. Or perhaps you're all people who write assignments and a couple treats for all of your exchanges and there's no issues at all with regard to this. Then, enjoy this peek into my head and see what sort of strange creatures live there and come out to play.

Exchanges are usually a one-to-one ratio. I write a work, I receive a work, and everyone walks away happy, and then there's a collection to browse through of all the neat things that everyone has composed, and comments can be left, and the whole thing is just delightful. Sometimes you end up going out to the pinch hit list, but that still means basically a one-to-one ratio of gifts received to gifts sent.

For the most part, though, I don't tend to write treats, because I'm often working on two or more exchanges at the same time, and I want to make sure that I've gotten all of my assignments done before I start picking up extra work. I have done a few where I've answered the call for pinch hits, so some collections have more than one work of mine in them, but I'm not the most prolific author in any exchange at all.

For some exchanges, like Chocolate Box or Trick or Treat, the lower word count requirement is meant to encourage writing more things for people, and so sometimes in those cases I end up with three or more gifts for having written only one, and that starts to get a little at me because it feels like unearned largesse from others. Yes, fanfic is based around a gift economy, and so everyone is freely giving their works to their recipients as well as building their own presence in the place where those fics are stored, but there's something that's feeling unfair about giving one and getting three. When it's for the smaller exchanges, getting a few five hundred word fics doesn't feel like it was the biggest time commitment from the authors to me, and so it doesn't ping terribly, other than if you look at my profile, you'll see exactly that - more gifts received than gifts given. Which doesn't say anything about the wordcount of those gifts, or totals about words given versus words received, but there's a certain self-judgment that comes along with it, as to whether I'm doing it wrong by not having an even count of gifts to assignments fulfilled.

The judgment starts to get a lot louder and more insistent when it turns out I've given one work to an assignment and received more than one complete work in return for exchanges that aren't trying to be popcorn-sized. There's something in my head that starts wondering about the fairness of it all if I'm giving a complete story in 1,000-3,000 words, getting a story that was 3,000-5,000 words and then getting an additional gift on top of that that was 10,000 words as well. I can't control what other people choose to write, of course, or who they choose to gift it to, and that should, presumably, be enough to make that judgmental feeling go away, but brains are weird.

After all, I'm doing everything that I've been assigned to do, and I haven't defaulted, and someone else decided to write something extra and nice for me and others. And they're doing it of their own free will. And I don't know the details of what a gift is going to be until it's revealed, so there's no reason to feel like there's an obligation to give every word back that I've received, every additional gift having to get repaid in turn or paid forward to someone else. (See the rubber ducking going on?) It's not fair, no, if fair is supposed to mean a completely equal share of everything, bit for bit, word for word, gift for gift, whether to the person who gave the gift or to someone else.

And yet, I was talking about the differences between reciprocity and mutuality with others, and how reciprocity's older meaning used to mean things like "the things you do with all guests because they are guests and you are a civilized person, and that they will do the same for you should you be a guest in their house." And the relationship between the divine and the humans, where the humans make the sacrifices, say the prayers, and comport themselves according to the contracts and commands of the divine, and the divine responds in turn by blessing the people, the crops, and making sure the civilization itself prospers. Although there's enough wiggle in both entities' responsibilities so that you don't always get the specific blessing you asked for, even if it turns out to be the one that you needed. And sometimes what gets sacrificed is what was plentiful that year, even if what's normally been sacrificed is something different. Or the prayers change form because there's a new priest in town and the ritual needs to be a bit more spectacular in a time of trials. But the main idea remains the same. The specifics may change, but the agreement is in place.

It's easier to say that the gift economy of fandom is more about people as equals giving things to each other because they're equal and because they're fans, because there are stories that still need telling from our imaginations, canons that need fixing, because storytelling is definitely a human thing, and because charging money for this would invoke a lot of terrible lawyers and such. So it shouldn't matter how much gets given, or received, so long as everyone gets what they want.

...and still.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Yoko Kanno - The Vision of Escaflowne - Cradle Song

[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.]

Especially as the deadlines for exchanges loom large, or any other deadline that might be on your plate, there's a certain amount of anxiety that comes with writing to specification by a certain time. I'm pretty sure that authors who have just signed their contracts have similar issues when it comes to making sure their second work comes in with as much quality and patience and careful attention to details as the first one did. Because the first work is the one that's had an infinite amount of time to prepare for, and the second...doesn't.

Exchange writing does help with getting people to the idea of writing on a deadline, as does writing a NaNovel, or participating in one of many different opportunities that ask for someone to keep writing every day/week/month/year. Like December Days (or the Daily December), for example. There's a certain amount of "do I have enough knowledge or curiosity to post one thing each day for 31 days at the end of the year? Goodness I hope my audience can help provide some of the topics, or something similar."

In any case, and I'm encountering this in some of my works, and in December Days, too. there are times where you find yourself staring at a blank cursor blinking at you, or a blank page, or an infinite canvas just waiting for something to step in and be awesome, and...nothing's coming. Zip, zero, nada. Or you've written out all the words that were in the original idea, and you've explored all the places you wanted the thing to go, and there's still a few thousand words to go before you've made it to the requirements for your exchange, or your NaNovel. At that point, there's a certain amount of "help, what do?" and the anxiety is trying to take control and you want to give it up, but there are some things that can help you get over the line. We're assuming at this point that you've gone through things like sleeping and eating and taking breaks to refresh your mind (and possibly doing things like clicky-games and other things that help you get out of your conscious head and make sure that you have the energy levels needed to continue with the work). If there's still nothing there, even after this, then perhaps these suggestions will help.

A first suggestion might be to find a beta reader for your work, especially if you are only a little short of your word count requirement. Beta readers help you find your plot holes, spaces where you're skimping on the explanation, confusing parts of the action sequences, and other spots that might do better with a few more words applied to them. A beta that asks questions about how the plot flows, and whether the characters chosen are the ones that would make things work best, and expresses confusion where needed can add a significant amount to the wordcount and make the work even better in the process. Betas and editors can also reduce the wordcount by asking for tighter prose to make things better, but that also leaves room for more plot and answering the questions of your reader.

Not everyone ends up having a beta in their life or has their request filled when they go asking for one with enough tine to get something done. Or the project is too far in the early stages to have a beta go looking at it, and there's nobody around to bounce questions off of while trying to get into the creative mode. In those situations, there's still something useful that can be done, something that we can borrow from people trying to solve problems in technology or other spaces: Find a rubber duck.

It doesn't have to be an actual rubber duck, although these days, you can find a rubber duck (or other animal) in just about any sort of dress or professional occupation. It can be googly eyes on a microphone, a plush toy that's been with you since childhood, or any other thing that you can look at and that you won't feel all that self-conscious talking to when there's nobody else around. (Or if there are other people around, too. If they're creatives or people who use the rubber duck technique, they'll probably understand, and they might join in on the process.) Humans are really good at working through their problems when they're talking to someone...or something, as it turns out. Being able to voice problems aloud can sometimes make them their proper size, and rambling your way through possible solutions without anyone around to hear the thought process aloud is sometimes really helpful, as we sometimes realize what we're saying is a solution that will work, or is at least a plan of action on how to go about trying to find a solution. Sometimes it helps us define the problem and figure out what option we're looking at. Even if solutions aren't forthcoming, it can feel like progress.

And sometimes, all you need is a little progress and the muse revisits, or the words start to come out again. Which is one of the best feelings in the writing world, to go from a few hundred words down to more than a thousand words over the count you need, because of the timely application of a beta. Or a rubber duck.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Yoko Shimomura - Musique pour la tristesse de Xion

[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.]

On the last post, I talked about prompts, and spent a certain amount of time taking about how having too much detail is sometimes a hindrance for a prompt, because it restricts the creativity and ability of the author to put their own stamp on the narrative. Leaving room for interpretation is important when it comes to leaving something that a person will enjoy writing and reading.

This year, though, for a particular exchange, I got to experience the opposite of that problem. There was fandom and pairing and medium data, the minimum requirement for signing up for the exchange, but there were no prompts, no letter, nothing at all that have even the slightest hint of what the recipient might have wanted in the story they were asking for. It's a nonexistent set with two characters on the stage, and it's time to make a story, no really. That kind of thing could crack a writer and send them running into the streets, screaming about bears that won't leave them alone.

Thankfully, there were a few things that were working in favor of this not being a thing that required superior anything to achieve. First, it was a megafandom. I often include one or two in my signups, if they're available, to make it easier for matching purposes in case there aren't enough people in one of the smalller fandoms. Being a megafandom means less pressure that your work is going to be part of the small amount of works that are involved in that particular fandom's materials. And while the pairing was likely rarer than most, it certainly wasn't supposed to be between two characters that had a single sentence of description in the corpus of the canon. So there was still plenty of space for making it your own work, although the chasm yawned big.

I spent a particularly large amount of time in that space waiting for the recipient to provide more clue about what they wanted than just that. And when that extra help failed to materialize, I got some useful advice on what to do. It's not quite "throw penguins," but it's close. Given that I had nothing else to work with, someone told me to write a work that I would be proud of having created. Essentially, to treat it as though I were writing it for myself, and that I had decided on this pairing as something I would write.

There was an additional part that eventually made it an easier task than before, in that I realized I could work the situation into an ongoing universe that I had created before, which helped immensely in getting setting, plot, and characters going in the direction I wanted them to go, because now it was just writing characters that I had written before, and then adding a new one into the mix. That took a lot of the stress off, as well, since I had free reign to essentially write what I wanted and then gift it away.

Unsurprisingly, I didn't get any comments on that one from the recipient. Not even a "hey, I read this" kudo, either. A complete void, from start to finish, despite having a fairly extensive amount of fiction to their name. It was an exercise in frustration for the most part. The composing of the fic was delightful, because I was doing it to satisfy myself and nobody else. But all the rest of the bits that I like about exchanges weren't there. No peering into the head of someone else, no acknowledgement of how on the mark (or off of it) the work was, none of it.

Don't do this to your exchange participants, please. Give them something to work with and then give them at the very least a thank you at the end for the gift they created for you. (Or signal the account that might be specifically there to give thanks in case works get orphaned or defaulted upon or otherwise don't end up with a recipient. Even if the account itself can only give thanks, it's still a useful way of closing the loop.)

If you do end up not giving prompts, don't expect what you get to be anything you were expecting, because that's a free pass to your creator to do whatever it is they want, so long as they respect the DNWs and have the required fandom and pairing and it meets the requirements. That could mean a fantastic creation that everyone really loves, or it might be something done by rote without a spark involved in it, exactly at the wordcount required to be a gift, and then they'll go merrily off writing something for someone else who will appreciate it more than you are.

Current Mood: energetic
Current Music: Cliff Friend and Dave Franklin - The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down

[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.]

Part of the reason why I really like exchanges is because it offers a twofold purpose - getting ideas that I'm not writing right now out of my head and into a space where someone else might write them, and giving me some insight into someone else's head to see how they view the world and its characters. We may not have compatible ideas about the characters, setting, and plot, but if someone can describe the space they want me to work in, I can usually get it to go. There are times where I've had struggles with getting ideas or simmering to come to life immediately. Sometimes it's that I don't have an idea that works yet, and sometimes it's the prompt (or the prompt and letter) that is getting a little in the way. So, I thought I might talk about what makes a good prompt for me.

Receiving a letter and prompt is fine for me, as is a prompt by itself. What I like in a prompt is a sketch of the space you would like the work to inhabit. I'll take the do-not-wants into account, and having a list of tropes and ideas you like is helpful for detail setting (and sometimes, perhaps, helping flesh out the arc a story is going to take), but what I my want are thematic, big picture things. This doesn't have to be elaborate. "I want a work with Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty about the spiral of revenge" is a good prompt. It might turn unexpectedly, if your work turns out to be Holmes trying to pull Moriarty out of that spiral, instead of both of them getting locked into it with each other, but it's a good thing to start with. (You can specify if you want it to be about those two doing revenge to each other.) Details can help shape the way you would like it to go, but there has to be room for creative flexibility and for the creator to put their own stamp on it, or you're dictating something that you have enough detail to write yourself. (There are communities for that, too - plot bunnies that you just by get to and need to be let free for someone else to use.)

I tend not to like (or give) overly detailed prompt materials because I tend to think in themes and tropes as the way to convey information to a creator that gets that sketch quality across. I know which characters I'd like, I'm suggesting specific relationships to write, and I usually want to tie it all together under a few ideas that I think will animate the scene. This is usually where some of my Three Point Characterization will come through, as well. For a gift work I received this year, I suggested Squall Leonhart and Laguna Loire (both playable characters in Final Fantasy VIII) on the theme of reconnecting with the people important to you. Squall is an orphan raised in an organization that turns out elite soldiers designed to neutralize a recurrent threat to the world in the form of The Sorceresses. His entire life that he can remember has been in soldier, and then officer, training for the purpose of killing a Sorceress when she appears. In military matters, he is peerless, but as the game progresses, he keeps getting into situations where killing something isn't going to help anything. Squall just doesn't know how to people.

Laguna is a somewhat untethered soldier in the army of one of the various nations in the planet, and while he does care about people and things, he's not looking to get attached to anyone or anything. He ends up falling in love with someone, having a child with her, and then running away from the responsibility of fatherhood, eventually managing to obtain a very high political office in another country. Although the narrative never fully confirms it, it hints very heavily that Laguna's child is Squall. Squall and Laguna eventually meet each other and work together on the sorceress problem, but there's still not a lot of trying to reconnect time, because sorceresses.

Which is to say there's plenty of space for interpretation in what happens after the world-ending threat is taken care of, and on the idea of "Squall has no idea how to people, and has grown up with no father, and now this goofball is trying to reconnect with him. Laguna is regretful for not being there for Squall, but he's got no idea how to parent, and he doesn't even know what that will look like, much less how to get a genuine connection," someone wrote me 10,000+ words.

A prompt doesn't have to be super long or detailed, if there's enough to give someone a push in the right direction. At least, it seems to be working for me.

Current Mood: amused
Current Music: One Republic versus Angelica Schuyler - Satisfied Stars

[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.]

Some people get their best work done by writing by themselves. Some are fortunate enough to have a place they can go to not be distracted by anything on the outside while they get the writing they want done. Isolation, and a supportive enough structure to their life, means having the ability to think and compose away from distraction and the things that often get in the way of focused attention and work. Like kids. And household requirements. And, sometimes, partners and others who demand time from you for their own purposes. (Not all of which are terrible, honest.)

But sometimes writing by yourself isn't fun, or you want to noodle around in a fandom in a low-pressure environment, or the well of ideas isn't producing anything immediately that wants to turn into something. That's where the communal parts of fiction writing can come in handy.

If you're interested in a specific fandom, there's a good chance there's a community for it on your preferred blogging and social media platform, assuming it hasn't imploded, exploded, or had the advertisers bring the axe on it so that it can't or won't host the content that the fans are there for. If it's Dreamwidth, there's a good chance that in addition to the community about the fandom in general, there's one specifically about providing a place for writing and/or inspiration for writing. And probably one more that is specifically about that fandom and NSFW inspirations for writing. At least. And, for the most part, the people on DW like it that way, and seek out the things that are appropriate to the level they want to be involved, at the kinky classification they want to be involved at.

Many of those communities offer prompts in various forms - solicitations from the community's members that then other members of the community can claim and write, or "bingo cards" composed of words, tropes, characters, situations, or just about anything that someone wants to throw into a randomizer and then spit back out a 5x5 grid of possibilities from. (Some of those generators aren't strictly random, as they might want to put various thematic elements on specific columns or rows. Some of them, though, anything goes.) Bingo cards can be played any way the person likes, but cover-all-squares or "blackout" bingo is one of the more popular ones. There's also prompts from other works, pictures, thematic ideas, and a whole lot more. If you're looking to up your writing game, but you don't know where to start on a particular work, there are a lot of ways of getting inspired, or at least a few of the bits filled in to start writing with.

My personal favorite community-based writing exercise is the fiction exchange. Exchanges generally work in the following way:

Based on the theme of the exchange (which can be anything - fandoms, tropes, pairings, kinks, and so forth), a set of characters/works/relationship pairings (and moreings) are nominated to be included in the set of possible things someone can write for the exchange.

Moderators and exchange runners clean the tag set by removing tags that don't fit the theme, are duplicates of other tags, or don't qualify for the tagset the way they've been nominated.

With a tag set finalized, the exchange is then opened for people / pseudonyms / accounts to sign up for the exchange. In their sign-ups, participants must meet a set minimum of different requests and offers. Requests are tags the person signing up would like to receive as a gift work to them, offers are tags the person signing up is willing to write for someone else. The requests portion is often accompanied by "optional details," a space that allows the requester to make prompt suggestions or expound upon the things they definitely do not want in their work. Requests may also link to a "letter" (usually a blog post) for their creator where the requester can expound at length about the things they like, dislike, and think might be good prompts about all the requests they are making.

Once the sign-up period is closed, through the magic of algorithms and/or a lot of hand-sorting and comparison, each request is paired up with a compatible offer (usually the minimum match for AO3 is one fandom, one character or pairing, one form). This doesn't mean that the person filling your request is the person you're writing an offer for. (If that happens, it's a rarity, or you were the only people who matched on that particular fandom/pairing.)

Writing time! Each person with an assignment creates a work that meets the minimum requirements of the exchange and posts it in the correct place, addressed to the right person.
- Sometimes, due to circumstances, a person can't fulfill their assignment. There's usually a deadline (one or two weeks before the assignment is due) for a person to default on their assignment. Sometimes that carries various penalties with it, but what's important is that the assignment is then opened up to the community as a "pinch hit," where some enterprising writer will see something they like and write a work that fits the assignment, so that there's a gift waiting for the person who fulfills their end of the assignment, instead of having written a work and gotten none in return.
Once the due date for all assignments is past, the exchange organizers go through and make sure that all the assignments turned in fit the minimum requirements of the exchange and are actual, complete works. A week's time is usually budgeted for this and the inevitable post-deadline pinch hits that appear after someone who didn't self-default, but also didn't turn in an assignment that fits, are then defaulted.

Once it's been determined that everyone who has written a gift will receive a gift in turn, the collection is opened and recipients get to read their gifts, and all the other works in that collection.

I like exchanges a lot because of the way that there's a work waiting for you and one that you've written, plus all the other ones. It's neat to have people writing their takes on ideas that are in your head, and to do the same to someone else's idea. Exchanges also have variable minimums (items like Chocolate Box or Trick or Treat have 300-500 word requirements, because they want to encourage writing many things, but things like the Fandom 5k want 5000 words minimum (1/10th of a NaNovel) for when you have a hankering for longer fiction writing) and many of them also have art, podfic, or video options as well, so sometimes you write a story for someone and get some fanart in return. It's neat to see all the variations on a theme going through each of the works in the collection.

There are other ways to engage your community in shared writing, like workshops, write-ins, and other things that can happen in the world around you as well as the on-line spaces that you inhabit. Fandom is a community at heart, even if some of the elements of that community can be toxic as fork. It's neat to go out and participate in that wider community, and depending on the things you do, you might end up making some new friends and seeing familiar faces in and around the spaces that you're part of. Plus, there are the kudos and comments that your work gets, and sometimes, there's downright wonderful amounts of squee from someone about something you wrote. It really helps to reinforce the idea that You Really Are Good Enough when someone is gushing about the work you made to the point where they hit the character limit for a comment and have to go into a second (or third!) comment just to capture what they found was so interesting about it.

So, when you're ready, and you feel like you have enough practice under your belt, step out into the community and find the people interested in the same things you are. There's a lot out here to explore.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Abney Park - Sleep Isabella

[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.]

I should say this to start: You can't. Regrettably, perfect beings that make no mistakes at all are only in our stories. At some point, at some time, we're going to screw something up.

It doesn't even have to be an intentional mistake. How many stories that were of the genre canon are now falling away because they used perfectly acceptable language, possibly even polite language, for the time, and it turns out that those of us in a different time find those words wholly offensive? We struggle with word choice in our own times -- how many people know someone who wants to reclaim a pejorative for a community so that it becomes a label of pride rather than shame or scorn? Who has N-word privileges, and is it okay for a writer who doesn't to write a character that does, and to have them use it?

Who lives, who dies, who gets to tell your story?

These days, there's a much bigger push in publishing and media to let people tell their own experiences, using their own voices, and casting people of the same color, background, sexuality, neurotypicality, and locale as the characters in those stories when they need actors and voices and animating forces. The traditions of those worlds were forged in profoundly -ist times with -ist ideas to prevent anyone the cis-het-WASP-men group found inferior or threatening to themselves from gaining any power, and after entrenching themselves as the gatekeepers, those ideas continue to hold more sway than they should, existing on their own inertia and trying to resist meaningful efforts at change.

Does that mean everyone is restricted to writing only what they have personally experienced and the identities they have for themselves? Not necessarily, but it does mean creators who don't have those lived experiences should understand the risks they undergo when writing outside themselves. The farther away from one's own experience the character is, the higher the probability of screwing things up. And, depending on where they sit on the privilege versus marginalization ax(e/i)s, there's also a consideration that their story might take up space that could have been given to a writer who is writing from their own voice. In theory, the space should be big enough that each lived experience, from the boring to the terrifying, has a place at the table and publishers get to choose the thing that matches what they want to sell...assuming the publisher is taking a look at the whole field of possibility and they're not consciously or unconsciously excluding people from the search. Which is a pipe dream in our current reality, but is hopefully getting better, contract by contract, Kickstarter by Kickstarter.

How do you avoid getting it terribly and offensively wrong, then? Research up front can help a lot. Read people who have the voice of the character you're thinking about writing. Support the work of people who are doing the job of educating the people around them about what it is like to be them. Read the fiction they write as well as nonfiction. Read broadly. Talk to people broadly, if they're willing to talk to you, and show your appreciation with support. After all of that, decide whether you want to go forward from there. In fanfiction, the characters and their backgrounds are set more definitively than when creating your own, but that doesn't mean it's clear sailing. Sometimes creators don't do the research themselves.

I enjoyed The Dragon Prince, but I might be hesitant to engage in fiction writing for it, because there are more than a few characters there with experiences vastly different than mine. What it's like to be brown-skinned and royal. How being deaf, a commander of military forces, and needing an interpreter changes the way you interact in a fantasy-type setting. And that's before you get to the elves, who have a justified grudge against the humans for an act of war that the humans perpetrated on them and several other of the species of the neighboring kingdoms. There's a lot in there that I have no experience with, and so I might have to pick my way carefully and do a significant amount of research before feeling like I might have a basic-and-still-not-necessarily-right understanding. Assuming I want to stick to the canonical portrayals and try to do something that thinks seriously about the consequences of those sorts of things. Yes, there's a culture of "Don't like? Don't read." in that area, but what happens in that situation is that someone who isn't doing well doesn't necessarily get any feedback on needing to do better. (It's not the job of the oppressed to educate their oppressors.)

So, there are things that can be done to reduce the risk involved in characters and their protrayals. Research beforehand is one of the big ones. Not stepping on the toes of someone whose experience is relevant is another. But there's also someone who can help on the back end of a work to make it better and hopefully avoid committing terrible faux pas. Professionally produced and published works go through an editor, who makes sure the plot makes sense, and also checks SPAG -- Spelling, Punctuation, and Grammar, to make sure that the language parts aren't confusing or illegible. And, hopefully, spots all the typographical errors. Many fic authors (and a fair number of the professionals) have beta readers who help with these editorial functions, as well, as having a fresh set of eyes on your work can help expose things that you haven't addressed, or spot the one place in the story where you've used the wrong pronouns for a character. (I, thankfully, spotted that before I hit post on a recent work of mine.) Beta readers are valuable, like editors, and their contributions should be acknowledged and thanked, and if you can manage it, rewarded.

There's a specific class of beta reader now coming into prominence as authors take more care to not engage in gross stereotyping or ignorant character portrayals called sensitivity readers, and their job is essentially to go through the work as someone who has had the experiences of the character that you would like read to make sure they're accurate and true to actual experiences of an actual person. Sensitivity readers are very much worth their weight in experience, and deserve what they charge you for their services. (Pay people for their work.)

These things help reduce error rates, but they won't necessarily get rid of all of them. Unintended portrayals are still possible, even if you've had someone look it over to try and get rid of them. And sometimes, those things will go unnoticed for a while before someone takes the time to say that the portrayal is wrong and explains why. Those people should also be thanked, because there's a good chance that they're not the first person that came across the problem. They're the first person to actually say something about it in the hope that you'll change it, fix it, or erase it to make the story better. There's a simple script to follow when something like this happens: own, apologize, repair.

If the person telling you is doing so in good faith (because some people think it's hi-lar-ious to troll others about their portrayals of characters): Own up to the fact that you made a mistake. Getting defensive about it is going to make it less likely for someone to tell you about the next problem that shows up. Remember that intent isn't magic, and what you tried to do may not have been what actually happened.

Apologize for the mistake. Do it sincerely and as swiftly as you can. That may mean having to get over the initial rush of emotions and feeling attacked, so if you have to wait, wait, instead of putting up something insincere or guided by anger. Readers have good eyes for spotting when an apology is sincere (because it tends to involve someone owning up and not saying phrases that place the blame for the issue on someone else getting offended rather than the person for making the mistake) and insincere apologies usually have the same result for someone not owning up to the mistake in the first place.

Repair, where it's warranted and in the way that's asked. You're not the expert in how you can make this up to the community that you offended. They are. Repair is also not usually he place for grandstanding and being highly visible and drawing attention to yourself as you are repairing the damage. If that's what's asked of you, then pull the focus and do your repairs, but it's not a likely outcome. Repair is also not about you and your feelings on the matter, because if you make it all about you, you're often continuing to do the things that led to the mistake in the first place. Repair might mean removing the work entirely, which is hard, but if that's the best way to avoid continuing to cause harm, that's the thing to do. It goes in the pile of "practice" and hopefully something better comes out of the next attempt.

It is a sad fact of our lives that we will not be able to get through without mistakes. But that doesn't mean we don't have tools and expertise that we can tap into so that the risk is lowered, and methods we can apply when it turns out that we've made a mistake and need to take responsibility for it. We can't avoid screwing up, but we can control the damage that it causes.

Current Mood: awake
Current Music: Calvin and Hobbes - The "I'm Very Sorry" Song

[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, like half the month.]

Sometimes, in a big work, you have a lot of characters that need to get on stage, perform their lines and actions, and then go off until it's time for their next cue. Ensemble casts often need someone to help steer the audience through the action and provide context for what is going on. Choosing a narrator out from the group often requires some decisions to be thought through, to make sure that there's someone there for all the action that needs to happen in their view. Sometimes there's going to have to be more than one narrator if the action happens in such a way that there are two (or more) distinct groups that have all the roles and requirements to get the story told. Sometimes, even when there's a small cast, there still have to be decisions made about who gets the role of the narrator.

I think the question of the narrator is a lot easier to answer if you see that question as a similar one: "Whose perspective matters?" I have likely heard it from one (or more) of the panels on writing and creating that I've attended, so much credit to all the writers out there who have been saying this for as long as they have. The story that you're going to tell is going to have a perspective on everything, from how the characters see each other to how the action unfolds. You make choices about what and who to include and exclude from you story all the time. And more often than not these days, even if your narrative entity is omniscient and knows everything, they're going to have a perspective on things about which of your characters is right and heroic and which is villainous and wrong. So, whose perspective is the one that you want to promote and make important to the narrative?

Whether working in original fiction or genre fiction or fanfiction, the character you give perspective and narrative weight to influences the entirety of the story. It would be an entirely different series if it were Draco Malfoy and the Sorceror's Stone, or Dudley Dursley and the Sorceror's Stone. Or if the narrative generally believed that Harry Potter had no special destiny at all, and was just being a child who liked to make trouble for everyone else. Or a story where Harry is the viewpoint character, but it's Neville who is the child of prophecy and the real threat to He-Who-Should-Not-Be-Named, and everyone is sinking their resources into protecting him and not Harry. These are all perfectly good stories, and I'll bet each of them has been written more than a few times and different ways. Whose perspective matters depends on the story you want to tell. Is it about a character that's reluctant to embrace the hero role? One that dives in too quickly and needs to learn more before going back out? An interested bystander? The reporter chasing Superman? A string of people who keep encountering an alien that's always just a bit off, but they go on adventures in time and space together? (The Doctor is almost never the narrator of the story of the Doctor, because we need humans to relate to the Doctor, rather than trying to understand the Doctor from a Time Lord's perspective.) Is the villain the storyteller you need, because you need to show that the way they've been portrayed is unfair, or because there's a much more sinister conspiracy or rot in the nominally-heroic department that needs exposing? Whose perspective can give you as much or as little of the story as you need?

So what happens when you have multiple possible narrative characters and any of them could shoulder the narrative duties that you have in mind? Well, at that point, assuming the characters that you have to work with are diverse enough that you have options to choose from that aren't "that cis white dude, that cis white dude, that cis white dude over there," my suggestion is that the character who can provide the most insight into the world, because they're not part of that world's majority/ies, is your best bet. It's a good way of getting in some worldbuild into your story by going through the perspective of someone who gets affected by societal prejudice, legal prejudice, or the intended "unintended" consequences of the way the society structures itself. It might inform the plot, but it also serves some other purposes, like giving representation to characters that might not otherwise be represented in stories and also it might help someone think through the consequences and the ways that their intended society idea might fail, skew, or otherwise do things it wasn't intended to do. Because readers of your work are likely thinking about those things, and if you fail particularly hard on something, they might put the story down and walk away at that point. (Or they might swear you off as a writer if you consistently seem to be failing at it.)

How do you avoid flinging yourself headfirst into the pitfalls that await you? Well, the only way to avoid it completely is to not write, and that's not what we're here for. So the next post will have some suggestions on how to potentially recognize when you're in a space that could be dangerous, and ways that the danger might be minimized or mitigated.

Current Mood: bouncy
Current Music: Danny Elfman - Serenada Schizophrana - IV - The Quadruped Patrol

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December Days 2018 #31: AO3 Output June-December 02018 +2 comments
December Days #30: Hit the Remix Button +3 comments
December Days 2018 #29: Take Care Of Yourself +2 comments
December Days 2018 #28: Constructive Criticism Often Isn't. +5 comments
December Days 2018 #27: There's Always Someone Better +2 comments
December Days 2018 #26: Yuletide, Part Two +2 comments
December Days 2018 #25: Yuletide
December Days 2018 #24: The Internet Is For...
December Days 2018 #23: Why Anonymity?
December Days 2018 #22: When Do You Start Creating Fanworks?
December Days 2018 #21: No Comments, No Kudos, No Good? No way. +2 comments
December Days 2018 #20: Commenting Is A Learned Skill +9 comments
December Days 2018 #19: Taxonomies, folksonomies, and TAG YOUR WORK, DAMMIT. +2 comments
December Days 2018 #18: Is It Fair To Give More Than You Receive? +13 comments
December Days 2018 #17: How Do I Make Wordcount When The Well Is Dry? +2 comments
December Days 2018 #16: No Prompt? No Problem.
December Days 2018 #15: What Makes A Good Prompt?
December Days 2018 #14: Communal Writing Exercises
December Days 2018 #13: How Do I Avoid Screwing Up?
December Days 2018 #12: Whose Perspective Matters?

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Page generated Apr. 23rd, 2025 08:32 am

Sense, Nonsense, and Not-Sense

A waystation of News and Opinion

Entries tagged with december days: the "meh" in meta

December Days 2018 #31: AO3 Output June-December 02018

December Days #30: Hit the Remix Button

December Days 2018 #29: Take Care Of Yourself

December Days 2018 #28: Constructive Criticism Often Isn't.

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

December Days 2018 #26: Yuletide, Part Two

December Days 2018 #25: Yuletide

December Days 2018 #24: The Internet Is For...

December Days 2018 #23: Why Anonymity?

December Days 2018 #22: When Do You Start Creating Fanworks?

December Days 2018 #21: No Comments, No Kudos, No Good? No way.

December Days 2018 #20: Commenting Is A Learned Skill

December Days 2018 #19: Taxonomies, folksonomies, and TAG YOUR WORK, DAMMIT.

December Days 2018 #18: Is It Fair To Give More Than You Receive?

December Days 2018 #17: How Do I Make Wordcount When The Well Is Dry?

December Days 2018 #16: No Prompt? No Problem.

December Days 2018 #15: What Makes A Good Prompt?

December Days 2018 #14: Communal Writing Exercises

December Days 2018 #13: How Do I Avoid Screwing Up?

December Days 2018 #12: Whose Perspective Matters?

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