Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

In response to Liz’s latest comment…

Enjoying something and doing it for the fun are two different things. Psychology of the muse aside, it’s like the difference between taking fanfic writing seriously and treating it as just a hobby where you can blow off grammar and good taste.

When people start throwing around words like fun or happy that don’t really seem to refer to much, compared to fine old designations like joy or sorrow, I mourn the loss of the true meanings of words. Especially in the realm of emotions, good words are slipping away into a morass of vague synonyms. I fight back with the dictionary; there’s nothing like a controlling legal authority in these cases, and mine is Webster:

The relevant idiom is to make fun of, which is to ridicule, and in fun, which is, not seriously. I can only repeat that fun and games are not what I’m after here. If you told me you were after joy, or honor, or love, I would know what you were talking about, but fun? It’s an empty bit of slang, or as the dictionary puts it, it’s colloquial.

I usually get into this discussion over another word, happy. Happy means fortunate, which is obvious from the word itself. (See, for example, perhaps and happenstance, words that refer to chance.) When you extend it to an emotion that presumably results from the circumstance of good fortune, you get a weak word and a lot of people wishing they felt happy when they ought to be wishing to be happy. But people shy away from words that really say something, like joy.

So no, I’m not in it for the fun. You can keep the fun, and I’ll take the joy and the sorrow both. I still come out ahead.

Better summaries of The Origin of etc. are not forthcoming, but I found a nice thread in sci.anthropology: “Jaynes points out that a modern child if magically teleported back 3,000 to 4,000 years ago would grow up bicameral while a child from that era if teleported to today and raised would grow up conscious.” –Tom Bevington

Consciousness, to put it briefly, is a meme.

I’m glad I was prepared for the travesty that was this evening’s Buffy episode by Mustang Sally’s rant (temporary link) on The Death of Spuffy. I’m not quite that upset - I knew BtVS was headed downhill at warp speed back when it jumped the shark. That the show is still flailing around, doing more and more damage with less and less emotional impact, is no surprise. I almost miss the Evil Twins, though, of course, not enough to sit through an hour of whiny ENT posturing.

At least the fic was good. For a hilarious TOS/BtVS crossover, see Unless You’re Us by Kathleen Dailey.

   Phrase of the day: Arrow's Paradox

Who is Walter Jon Williams and where has he been all my life? He tosses off worlds like they were sentence fragments, and then he writes an entire novel in the present tense. The man has style. I couldn’t put Metropolitan down. In a novel full of good things, my favorite thing was the final pages. The pacing was amazing, the little cuts, Aiah’s pronouncement that if she knew Constantine she’d be there with him, everything was perfect. And it seems from his web page (http://www.walterjonwilliams.net/) there’s a sequel. I thought I was getting too old and jaded to find new favorites.

Liz tells me I should stop if it isn’t fun anymore. There are so many little assumptions hidden in her brief advice that I’m not sure where to begin.

For one thing, I was never in it for the fun, except on the reading side. I don’t read as much now partly because I don’t have time, and partly because I don’t enjoy the sorts of stories I used to, not the way I used to. But Liz was blogbacking my muse psychoanalysis, and the muse was never in it for the fun. The muse does not have such motives; it’s not clear the muse has motives at all.

She came to me and started writing, and while I was Insufficiently Reluctant, I was not having fun per se revising MII or Colony or The Museum until I knew every line by heart, no. I don’t even know what fun means in that context. I did it because the story was inside of me and wanted to come out, and the joy of making a story is not the same as the fun of chatting in #jetc.

If anyone out there is sacrificing the pain of hours writing fic for the fun of feedback or the glory of BNF, I feel sorry for them. They know not the muse. I never understand when someone undermines a story to push it to a particular audience, nor when someone rehashes old fic as part of the hamster wheel potlatch, because I fear and respect the muse more than that.

I’m not picking on Liz. I’m sure I’m confusing everyone with my muse psychoanalysis, because nobody believes in the muse herself. I do. For one thing, I’m willing to take the word of the many, many fanfic writers who’ve talked about their muses. Were they making analogies? Why would everyone make the same analogy?

If you want to know what the muse really is, read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. I’d summarize it myself, but it’s late and I still haven’t gotten around to today’s observations on the muse. Check out this summary; I skimmed it and it looks pretty good.

So, today on the muse: this morning on the T, I was wondering why the muse finds fanfic so much easier to write than original fic. I think it is the characters, after all. The characters are so familiar that all you have to do is toss them into, say, the Mirror-Mirror Universe, and you know, in that mysterious way the muse knows things, what they’re going to do. Presto! Story.

With original fic, a whole lot of which my muse has started and left lying around in various states of unpolish, there are too many vectors. What happens? Who does it happen to? What’s this person like? What will she do? There are too many angles for the muse to collate at once, I think. It must be much easier for LMB to write another Miles novel than to start a fresh fantasy. She starts with the character and fills in fresh ideas every time. Asimov, on the other hand, started with the Foundation idea and filled in fresh (let’s assume so for the sake of argument) characters every time. I think it’s easier, and works out better, to start with the characters. Maybe that’s why when fanfic is good, it is very very good.

Well, I’ve fixed the Netscape 4.x problem again. Moveable type wrote over my stylesheet last time, because I was trying to be sneaky and edit it on the server instead of through the MT interface. You can set up MT to work that way, but you can’t do it both ways. I wanted to have my cake and eat it too…

I’ve also finished going through my old Blogger entries to give them MT titles and categories. So now, if you look in the Quizzes category, you’ll see all the online quizzes I’ve ever blogged. And so forth. It wasn’t necessary, but it was geeky, so I did it.

There’s a killer thread going in ASC about contest suggestions, and I have more ideas about that alien transmitting messages to me through my molars (i.e., the muse), but for the moment I must keep up the illusion that I work here.

Fandom hasn’t been all fun and games, awards and challenges and Sections 31, you know. Think of all the people who toss you off lists and drive you out of genres, all the people who suck you dry then tell you to go take a long walk off a short bridge, all the people who rub you the wrong way then push you over the edge - all the infinite stupidity of fandom.

I’ve appreciated all the idiocy; I’ve appreciated it very much. Why? Because on my own, I’m far too loyal a person. I don’t quit jobs. I don’t drop out of school. I don’t leave lists. So it’s a great service when someone will throw me off a list and save me no end of reading, betaing and writing. It’s a great service when people drift out of a fandom and leave me behind twiddling my thumbs - when they stop tempting me to blow up the ship or assimilate the quadrant one more time. It’s a great service when they make a new fandom so huge and unnavigable that I give up on it in despair. It’s even a fine service when they write badfic, keeping me from reading because the stories I don’t care for so far outweigh the ones I do that there’s too little hope of striking gold.

All of these are ways to gain free time. Any old reason to put down a fic is a good reason, whether that it’s misspelled, or smutty, or angst-ridden, or stereotypical, or incomplete, or part of a huge arc I don’t have time to follow.

Am I a pessimist, because I see all this bad in fandom, or am I an optimist because I turn it all to my benefit? I don’t know - I’m more curious about what it says about my muse than what it says about me.

You see, it struck me that my muse is just another one of these time-saving external factors. In and of myself, I was too loyal to J/C, but the muse was bored out of her ridged skull and she started writing C/7 instead. I was never the type for murder and mayhem, but she borrowed Liz’s black leather and took out Janeway herself, several times over. I could never move on from VOY to another show, but she hopped right over to Tuesday nights and started writing Buffy. I could never walk away from fandom in general, but what has she written for me lately?

I want to stay in fandom, I want to finish the Seven Saga and the Chip Fic, I want the feedback and the derivative nature and the in-jokes; I want it all. She’s not interested. Maybe she’s just tired, maybe she’s been burned, or maybe she feels she’s been there and done that and has the ASC awards to prove it.

I don’t understand her. I’ve never understood the sort of person who’s capable of cutting her losses - I’m there in the brass band going down with the Titanic. She’s out at sea, tossing women and children out of her lifeboat so there’ll be more fresh water for her. She’s a menace, she is, and I don’t even know what she wants.

With my luck, she’ll spend the rest of my life filking tacky seventies songs.

   Word of the day: ethereal

I don’t know why I do this to myself, but I read Catch the Lightning by Catherine Asaro. I figured that for two bucks at Buck-A-Book I couldn’t go wrong. Much.

Well, there was a lot of gratuitous sex, as usual, but this time with a minor. Even fanfic writers quail at statutory rape, and if John Ashcroft had his way Catch the Lightning would go on the fire with Romeo and Juliet. David Brin wouldn’t be happy with all this Rhon prince and princess stuff, and the worst part for me was the data dumps. Yes, Asaro is a scientist, but raw science does not scifi make - not these days, anyway. I couldn’t tell Althor apart from the Kelric of the last Asaro novel I read; it’s possible they’re the same character, or at least father and son, so that’s not the damning point it might have been.

On the positive side, the book moved along briskly and took a violent change of milieu halfway through in stride. I’m beginning to think of Asaro as a mix of hard scifi and bodice-ripping pulps, and not an unsuccessful one. That doesn’t mean I’ll blow another two bucks on her, though - there are other fish in the sea.

Right now I’m in the middle of Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams, which appears, whenever I stop to think about it, to be written in third person present. WJW is a wizard at world-building. More to follow…

Looking for the Borg AU Classification?

In honor of my latest quiz results, I’ve fixed the Netscape 4.x display problems some more. Now the images shouldn’t float over the text in antique browsers. (The problem was the line-height inherited by paragraphs.)

I’m getting the idea, from the ongoing discussion of AU’s, that AU’s are different things to different people. I’ve come to the conclusion that travel between the canon universe and the AU, and the degree of technobabble excusing the AU, are issues of story structure rather than of AU type. I think I can come up with six different types of AU if I try hard enough, and make up names for them to boot:

The Borg AU Classification

1. Far Alternate: the most extreme AU vision changes the setting to something entirely alien. The characters are transported into medieval times, the Paleolithic or (in the case of non-scifi shows) outer space. Apparently this sort of AU is more popular in other fandoms than in Trek.
2. Near Alternate: the domain of inversion-universes, where the characters and settings are similar, but universe-level details have been changed - e.g., the Federation is now the bad guys, or all the male characters are now women, or Chakotay is the Starfleet officer and Janeway is the Maquis rebel. Such an AU is not rooted at any particular decisive event or turning point.
3. Timeline: the classic AU, rooted at a certain point of past canon - one decision is decided differently, and the rest of the show is changed. This is the “It’s a Wonderful Life” approach to fanfic. Such an AU can be spotted by the question it answers, such as, what if the Maquis had mutinied? (See MJB’s Revolution.)
4. Canon AU: a Near or Timeline established in canon. The classic canon AU is the Mirror-Mirror Universe, although the Year of Hell and the Admiral’s timeline would also qualify. See, for example, DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe.
5. Divergent Canonical: a divergence that begins with the canon universe, and ends up places canon is unlikely to go. Although similar to Timelines, Divergent Canonical has a break point which is not sharply defined and therefore is not central to the structure of the AU, making this approach the most open-ended and fruitful. Divergent Canonical stories are the longest - once you start diverting, it’s hard to stop. Such stories, if written before the fact, may be considered simple fanfiction. (The show may end this way.) If written after the fact, some may be more properly considered fanfix than AU. (The show should have ended this way.) See, for example, Virtual Season 7.5. There are non-fanfix examples as well; see The Captain and the Counselor series.
6. Convergent Canonical: the stealth AU tweaks the past in such a way as not to disturb the present. Like Divergent Canonical, Convergent Canonical may be considered simple fanfic. No known rules of canon are broken, but this approach usually pushes the envelope beyond what is decent and believable about canon. For example, any fanfic in which Tom Paris is Kathryn Janeway’s father, or in which Janeway and Chakotay met at Starfleet Academy, had a love child, and were brainwashed to forget it all (e.g., Regression) would qualify as Convergent Canonical. Bonus points if the love child is Tom Paris.

What’s left? What makes a story truly canonical? In some sense, everything we write is AU; only the screenwriters are writing canon. I believe the question of classifying fanfic explicitly as AU is rooted, not in canon, but in fanon. That is, a typical J/C-happily-ever-after story is fanonical for the J/C subgenre and therefore not an AU, although according to the list above it would qualify as Divergent Canonical. Likewise for any other common pairing, and possibly even obscure or squicky pairings.

On the other hand, any time you change the universe, rather than just the characters and pairings, you’re deep into the AU realm - even if you do it manually, by, say, letting the Borg win. An AU is like obscenity - you’ll know it when you see it.

I think that’s enough fanalysis for one night.