Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 18451

I’m taking a break at this word count because it means I’ve finally caught up. It’s not midnight on the West Coast yet by any means, but at the moment only 5% of NaNoWriters are officially caught up. I owe it all to the muse. When deprived of Internet access for an hour or two, she can really crank out the words. She’s written about 3,000 today, to make up for her inexcusable laziness and surfing yesterday. Actually, now that I count them, I think she wrote almost 3,000 words yesteday, too. Why did I feel so much more productive about it today?

Maybe I’ve stopped fighting and learned to love the technobabble. The title of this entry, Put one word after another, is one of the two pieces of advice from mystery author Julie Smith that came in my NaNo email today. The other one was, DON’T GET IT RIGHT, GET IT WRITTEN! Translated, they mean the only way to write is to write, and the only way to finish is to stop obsessing about quality—very NaNo advice. Yes, it’s the brute force approach to writing, and it’s working well for me despite my pro-muse prejudices. (I’ve been watching too much of The Forsyte Saga - pro-muse makes me think pro-Boer.) While doing some novel research earlier this weekend I stumbled across a quote about the muse; this is what got me muse-musing again:

But it is a fact that, in addition to memories from a long-distant conscious past, completely new thoughts and creative ideas can also present themselves from the unconscious–thoughts and ideas that have never been conscious before. They grow up from the dark depths of the mind like a lotus and form a most important part of the subliminal psyche.
We find this in everyday life, where dilemmas are sometimes solved by the most surprising new propositions; many artists, philosophers, and even scientists owe some of their best ideas to inspirations that appear suddenly from the unconscious. The ability to reach a rich vein of such material and to translate it effectively into philosophy , literature, music, or scientific discovery is one of the hallmarks of what is commonly called genius.
[…] The British author Robert Louis Stevenson had spent years looking for a story that would fit his “storong sense of man’s double being,” when the plot of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was suddenly revealed to him in a dream. –Carl G. Jung, Man and His Symbols

Note that Jung said that, not me. I’m not claiming to be a genius - it’s all too likely my muse has hit on a vein of fool’s gold. I’m just trying to make a meaningful distinction between which of today’s 3,000 words the muse wrote (the inspiration) and which ones I wrote (the perspiration). One thing that makes it hard to diffentiate is the out-of-nowhere quality of all creative thought. Even if you’re piecing together your latest romance novel out of selections from the Cliche Thesaurus, the arrangement is probably still original. So perhaps the question is how original?

I’ll take an example from yesterday rather than today, because it illustrates my point. I was writing a nondescript party scene, in which my main character was chatting with a minor character who just popped out of nowhere the last time I wrote a nondescript social scene. Both characters are refugees from somewhere else, and they were catching up with one another when suddenly, Minor Character pulled something out of his ear! I had no idea he was going to do that. Main Character was extremely interested in the technology behind the little microphone from Minor Character’s ear because he used to make similar devices Back Home. (I blew up Home in the first scene. That was fun.) It turned out that the Ear Device was created by an entirely new female character. And look, there she was on the other side of the room, ready to provide a needed love interest for Main Character. I had no clue, until the ear incident, how I was ever going to get Main Character involved in this new society.

So of the approximately 800 words in the party scene, I would say most were written by me, but at the point where Minor Character pulls Ear Device out of his ear and brings together even more threads of my plot than mentioned above, that part was the muse. I went on to finish the scene with a nondescript introduction of Main Character to Female Character.

To put it too briefly, the muse has been responsible for the plot of my novel, because she’s good at pulling threads together. I didn’t outline beforehand; in fact, I didn’t even come up with the subject of the novel until the week before. Up until then I had been considering several other ideas from my sci-fi universe’s timeline (two of them children’s stories), and even a disaster novel I’ve wanted to write for a long time. This was the only idea that came together, and it came together from several directions, including, oddly enough, a conversation with a coworker about an old mainstream novel she’d read.

I don’t mean to imply that the muse can’t write prose - she can. She’s written some lovely sentences in her day. Muse-prose is the sort of stuff that echoes the themes of the novel, and at only 18,000 words there isn’t much to echo yet.

Some NaNites have claimed that they’ve spent the first 20,000 words on character development and still don’t have a plot. I’m afraid I may also have this problem. I have mostly dialogue and flashbacks so far, and the character development is almost done. I think of it as my main plot all being there, but it’s more of a thematic direction than a logical sequence - there’s definitely not enough action. Aside from Ear Device, which just appeared yesterday, I have no subplots. I need to get at least one subplot in before I reach the end of the main plot, because subplots have to tie in to the main plot at the end.

I know what Julie Smith would say - stop thinking and get back to writing.

Word count: 11760

Yes, I’m behind again. Five thousand words every three days can get to be a bit much. I should probably bump myself up to that 2,000-a-day plan, just to compensate for my irresistible urge to goof off. For my latest NaNoWriMo procrastination I’ve set my Mac up to play Filk Radio. So far it’s been more folky than filky in my style, but I like folk music so I’m still listening.

I tried several browsers before I struck one that worked. Chimera, my Mac browser of choice, isn’t fancy enough yet to let the user choose an application for a new streaming file type. Internet Explorer 5 for Mac is supposed to do it, but despite following the directions to the letter, twice, all it did was crash. Yet another reason never to use IE, as if I needed more…

So I dug out Mozilla, which, like Chimera, is not officially supported by Filk Radio. I don’t usually run it because it’s not as fast as Chimera, though it’s more full-featured. The setup was much quicker than the unsuccessful IE version - I just followed the Netscape instructions, more or less. It thought I was on a T1 line, but I corrected that little misapprehension quickly. Presto! Filk! Then, once it had passed the streaming MP3 baton to iTunes (the designated helper application), I closed Mozilla and reopened Chimera. I’m stubborn that way.

I don’t quite understand how a cover of “From a Distance” with a couple of pronouns changed qualifies as filk. The ratio of meta-filk - filk about filking - to filk proper - songs about sci-fi - is even higher than the ratio of ville-wank to ville-fic, were that possible. Ah, here comes a real filk, of “Hotel California” - any fannish gear/you will find it here…

The ville implosion just goes on and on. There but for the grace of Kahless go I…

It’s all Seema’s fault that I’m following this and getting all riled up (see previous post) about crazy specialty fandoms whose claim to fame is a lot of tempests in a livejournal. Today’s Fandom Wank is still about BNF’s; in this round, The Brat Queen wonders whether she’s B or not.

My chosen quote is something verdani said in the Fandom Wank meta-comments about the aforementioned BNF thread:

If you were willing to put the kind of hard work that nobody anywhere appreciates into making discussion threads like that go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on, you’d be a BNF too. But I guess you’re not *up* to it, eh, slacker? GET OUT THERE AND GO TO WORK!

That’s a rather pithy way of saying LiveJournal made ville fandom the wankfest it is today. Wank, by the way, isn’t as offensive in the U.S. as in other Anglophone countries. Here’s the definition, straight from The Jargon File 4.3.3:

wank /wangk/ n.,v.,adj.
[Columbia University: prob. by
mutation from Commonwealth slang v. `wank’, to masturbate] Used
much as hack is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever
technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe
(negatively) the act of hacking for hacking’s sake (”Quit wanking,
let’s go get supper!”) or (more positively) a wizard. Adj.
`wanky’ describes something particularly clever (a person,
program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when
there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is
signalled by an overload of the `wankometer’ (compare
bogometer). When the wankometer overloads, the conversation’s
subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave. Compare
`neep-neeping’ (under neep-neep). Usage: U.S. only. In
Britain and the Commonwealth this word is extremely rude and
is best avoided unless one intends to give offense. Adjectival
`wanky’ is less offensive and simply means `stupid’ or `broken’
(this is mainstream in Great Britain).

Word count: 1734

Seema sends huggles to all of Trek fandom for, essentially, not being ville fandom. I second that huggle, and raise her a List of What’s Right About Trekdom:

Trek has one central archive, Trekiverse. It may be a couple of years behind, but anything that’s missing can be looked up in Google Groups. There are a few minor archives as well, such as the ones at JuPiter Station, Voyager’s Delights and the J/C Index, but they’re mainly link lists. No one gets any status in Trek for running an archive, certainly not BNF status. Insufficient Reluctance is appreciated and occasionally even thanked, but never worshipped.

Trek has a newsgroup. You can follow alt.startrek.creative and never, ever have to join a mailing list. This has worked well for Lori, and, aside from the lists I own, I don’t follow anything but ASC. I get all the good fic that way, because anyone who writes well eventually ends up at ASC. Since no one owns the newsgroup, no one gets any status out of it. Since the newsgroup is the main forum, no one in Trek is a BNF because she controls a pivotal list. None of the lists are pivotal - they can all be ignored without impairing your fan experience. (In fact, it would probably improve it.)

Trek has no blogging culture to speak of. A few of us still write Trek and blog, too, but there is no serious blogging about Trek fandom itself. For example, Seema and Lori blog mainly about their Real Lives, and my blog leans heavily towards science fiction and technology. Liz is all HP, Christine is AWOL. When we meta it’s cross-fandom, because the meta and blog culture we’re exposed to is cross-fandom. There’s no blog-based fan-wankery in Trek worth commenting about, because the BNF’s don’t blog (Seema excepted). So while you can make a name for yourself in certain newer fandoms by picking arguments with people who are lower on the BNF totem pole than you are and rubbing elbows with the Higher Fans (or vice versa), in Trek nobody can hear you blog.

Trek has geeks. It’s not something that fan writers think about often, but I believe the geek contingent lends a certain tone to, say, TrekBBS, and that attitude leaks down to the fanfic level. The fact that there is a Trek fandom beyond fanficcers makes the fandom less inbred than in shows where the fandom, is, essentially, the fanfic contingent. It gives us a bigger audience, more potential writers, and a place to farm out people who can’t write but still want to be fans. To be Myers-Briggs about Trek geeks, they tend to be N’s rather than S’s, since S’s don’t care for science fiction. They know what a light year is. They believe in IDIC. They can fake the technobabble. They may even know how to carry on a rational argument.

Seema said “mostly rational,” and it’s true that Trek has a few sockpuppets who are a great source of amusement on ASC. Trek has a few backwaters in which people can build up a sort of localized BNFdom, but when they venture out into the Real World of Trekdom, nobody knows their names. Whining about contests or other fans or the way the series ended just doesn’t cut it out here. Trek fandom is fair: everyone can write whatever pairing or fanfix they want, everyone can post to ASC, and everyone gets a fair shot in the ASC Awards. Nobody is in control, and nobody’s opinion counts for more than anyone else’s. There’s nothing to gripe about. We’re living in Gene Roddenberry’s perfect future out here.

Trek does have a few vile and irrational fans who think they can raise their status in fandom by attacking other people, but the truth is, they can’t. This isn’t high school, where cutting the other children down and puffing yourself up makes you popular. Nobody cares who’s in your clique or mine. Trek fans are adults.

In Trek, it’s all about the show and the fic. If you have nothing interesting to contribute, nobody will listen to you. If you can’t write like Penny Proctor, you’ll never be a BNF. Those are the breaks. Other fandoms should be more like Trek, and it’s just their bad luck that they haven’t the geeks, the newsgroup, and the adults it takes to Be Like Us.

Word count: don’t ask

I was going through my email backlog (only 600 to go) when I came across a contest announcement for Winter Magic, a non-J/C winter-theme contest. You can submit up to two stories, previously published or not. The entry deadline is November 30th, a problem for us NaNoWriters. Maybe there will be an extension… (wink wink nudge nudge)

Still open for business is Die J/C Die, which also allows previously published fic and up to three entries. The theme is torpedoing the J/C relationship permanently, though you don’t actually have to do much along those lines in the story itself. The entry deadline is December 15th.

For J/P fans, there’s also TomKat 2002, the new incarnation of the Twelve Moons of JuPiter awards. The deadline is December 15th; the rules are too confusing to say exactly how many entries you can have. It’s anonymous, at least.

Note that it would be simple to write a story or two that fit the first two themes and therefore enter two contests. It would be only slightly more difficult to take a non-J/C work-in-progress and make it fit one of the above. Doing all three would be quite a challenge, since it would involve convincing the first two contest runners to post your story anonymously for you. I have a J/P idea that fits the bill nicely, but I don’t think I’m up for that much run-around.

Word count: too embarrassingly low to mention

Seema, monitor of blogs far and wide, pointed me to this tussle in ville. My favorite part of the whole BNF Oppression debate was part of a comment by ethrosdemon:

I really believe the vileness of the SV fandom springs from the fact it was born after the advent of LJ and people can spout off and get immediate, and voluminous, response to everything they say.
The het/slash thing is just a red herring.

I’m going to take a big chunk out of my backblog by brain-dumping all my recent thoughts on Buffy. The older backblog item concerns the eternal topic of Why I Hate Volvo Boy. It’s not just his boxy build anymore.

Angel, in his lurky first-season incarnation, represents everything I disliked about the X-Files. XF fans can be divided into two camps - the Government Conspiracy people, and the Fat-Sucking Vampire (a.k.a. Monster Episode) people. I’m a monster episode girl. In Buffy, I don’t mind a charismatic monster that plays for a whole season, like the Mayor or Glory - it’s not arcs qua arcs that I dislike.

The Government Conspiracy style of writing, by no means limited to XF, makes the motions of a plot without actually having any fixed content. Writing is not a process of accretion, and a show does not end well if all it can do for itself is recap the various disconnected bits (pox? bees???). There is no connection, no cause-and-effect. Government Conspiracy writing is the form of plot wihout the substance.

Likewise, when Angel leaves Buffy, or Buffy leaves Riley, or Oz leaves Willow, or Xander leaves Anya, with no better motive than Joss made me do it, you have not a plot but a soap opera in which characters are pushed around for no adequately explained reason. People like Angel and Cigarrette Smoking Man aren’t characters - they’re angst ex machina. This is exactly was Nick Lowe was talking about in his article when he pointed out authors who “smuggle the Plot itself into the story disguised as one of the characters. Naturally, it tends not to look like most of the other characters, chiefly on account of its omnipresence and lack of physical body.” The Government Conspiracy is everywhere.

So bad episodes make much more sense that way, when you consider that the Plot made Oz run off to Tibet to find himself, or that Xander got cold Plot and left Anya at the altar. Angel’s main purpose in lurking around Buffy was to keep her up to date on the Plot. Whenever Chris Carter had a bad week, we got the Plot trying to infect everyone with pox using bees, or Scully getting kidnapped and impregnated by the Plot, or CSM trying to convince Mulder to join the Plot.

I’m still angry at the Plot for making Xander leave Anya. Xander, for all his silliness, never struck me as a cad or a coward. That he had visions of Anya as a hoary old shrew is just not sufficient excuse. It must have been the Plot, which is to say, Joss. However, if you’re still working from a rational basis, you see Anyanka’s troubles of last week and wonder what she did to deserve all this. The implication, with the flashback to her singing on Xander’s recliner, is that Anya’s mistake was wanting to devote her life to Xander. Really, she should have run off to Tibet or LA or South America like everyone else. Obviously a career isn’t the answer here - Anyanka had a very successful career before Xander, and a second one during Xander.

It’s one thing to make Buffy unhappy for legitimate plot reasons - it’s not easy being the Slayer and having to kill your friends. It’s another matter to go gunning for Anya and Xander. That’s plain authorial cruelty and caprice, punishing two characters not for being in the wrong place at the wrong time like Willow and the late Tara but simply for being in love and wanting to get married. Breaking up X/A was more unnatural than any vampires, demons or giant snakes.

Final gripe: Buffy could be a bit nicer to Spike now that he’s insane. Being the Slayer doesn’t give you a pass on common decency. After all, it was the Plot that made him attack her last season - it certainly wasn’t good characterization.

Here are some questions that have been circulating around the C/7 list. I thought they’d make a good blog meme.

Firstly, how do you feel about feedback? Do you live for it, ignore
it, think it’s nice but not essential?

I like feedback, but I have to conclude it’s not essential. I keep
website stats, and I’ve found that feedback comes from only a tiny
percentage of readers. So it’s my hits that make me happiest - they’re
the real feedback, IMHO.

If 27 people tell me my story is great, but then it’s
beaten in a contest by a story I consider to be a total piece of
crap, does that mean the feedback has been meaningless?

You have to judge the feedback on its own terms. Is it just a note to
tell you “I read this”? There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s like a
personalized hit tracker - but it’s not very meaningful beyond that. On
the other hand, if the feedback is constructive and helps you out in
your writing, or is exceptional (”this is the best story I ever read!”)
or comes from someone whose opinion you trust, then it can’t be
meaningless.

Contests are the bane of the fan world. They frustrate good writers
when they see certain bad writers win, and they also frustrate those bad
writers who don’t win. I’ve seen a lot of contests where the best story
didn’t win, and that’s especially common in the contests run exclusively
for shipper communities. I don’t mean just J/C ones, either. You
should never let a contest result get you down. Fanfic isn’t any fairer
than real life.

The best contests are those that are run blind (where the voters don’t
know who the authors are until the contest is over) and the ASC awards
(in which all fic posted to the Star Trek newsgroup over the course of
the year is eligible and votes are tallied by lines of feedback). Also,
recommendations pages like The Best of Trek tend to give more reliable
results than the average contest.

How many of you writers *know* when you’ve written something good,
regardless of whether you get feedback on it?

I know, at least, I know if it’s good by my personal standards of good.
I don’t think I have a different standard for my own fic as opposed to
other people’s, or for fanfic vs. professional fiction.

How many of you try to do something different with each story you
write?

I don’t try, per se. I’m not interested in writing different genres,
for example - only PG sci-fi interests me. However, part of what
interests me in a particular plot is finding a new way to, say, get the
entire crew pregnant or to get a certain pairing together.

How many of you have a billion ideas and use only a fraction of them
in your stories?

No, I don’t have many ideas for fanfic. I think I triage them - if they
really interest me, I can’t help but write them. Otherwise, I forget
about them pretty quickly. I do have more ideas than I can ever use for
original fiction.

And how many of you sometimes think readers are a bunch of morons who
wouldn’t know a good story if they fell over it?

I’ve probably written about this somewhere before. I don’t think any
readers are morons, or that their preferences are entirely attributable
to bad taste. Here’s my favorite quote on the matter:

I agree with Mia that certain shippers are looking for Jane Austen in
Space. I can’t say I object to Jane Austen anywhere, at any time, but
I have a beta monkey in the back of my brain that keeps me from enjoying
the worst of the lot. Some people are missing the monkey, but that just
makes them less critical readers, not morons. Really.

Things are gearing up for Beta Reader Appreciation Day on October 13th. Have you hugged your beta lately?

Seema debunks
myth #1:
There is no such thing as a born writer.

I’d like to join Seema in debunking this myth, though I believe the myth goes
the other way. How many times have I heard that all writers started out as bad
writers, that everyone has badfic in their closet, that any writer can improve
herself, that any writer, if she works hard enough, can grow up to be
Penny Proctor?

I just don’t buy it. Yes, it’s the American Dream, fandom style - anybody
can grow up to be President, or a doctor, or a millionaire. It’s a myth. Perhaps
it’s an important cultural myth of fandom without which our society would decay
into an on-line equivalent of lynch mobs and looters. Maybe without this myth
young fans could never be convinced to spellcheck and get a beta. Yet it’s just
more meta-fanfiction, just like “there is a D/7 fandom” or
“Resolutions was a great episode.” Myth, all of it.

I’ve seen a few examples of closet badfic from writers who claim to
Know Better Now™, and to tell the truth, they weren’t all that bad.
Ninety percent of
fanfic on Fanfiction.net is worse than the worst My Past Life As A
Badficcer™ fic I’ve
seen. Nor is FFN the only bit of evidence that Myth #1 is a myth. When I
consider the writers I’ve read since we all started, I don’t see a
significant improvement in their writing.

What I do see in both myself and most writers I enjoy is
fluctuation. You have good days and bad days, cheezy fics and award-winners.
Or if you have a muse, the muse comes and the muse goes. Even LMB
has astounding novels and merely superior novels, not necessarily in any order.
[The following sudden
transition is in no way a comparison of myself to LMB.] I wrote my most
popular fic almost two years ago, when I’d been writing for exactly six months.
Have I been steadily getting worse since then? I hope not. I’ve
spend a lot of time over some stories, and others I’ve tossed off quickly,
but that also fails to correlate with quality in any way I can see.

It’s not only good writers I fail to see improving - the bad ones don’t seem
to be getting any better, either. How many of us can honestly say we give a bad
writer a second chance, say, a year later, because by then they will have
improved? And yet, I doubt the problem is that bad writers have decided not
to improve themselves. I prefer to think they’re giving it their best effort,
writing what they think is a good sort of fic. A lot of the issue is taste, not
skill, and taste is not something that necessarily improves with
Hard Work™.

Do you still believe your fic is getting better and better every day? One
possible explanation for the myth is that the improvement a writer sees in
herself has little to do with what an average reader uses to judge fic. For
instance, J/C fans who read my first J/C fic and my last one would hardly notice
that I couldn’t write B’Elanna or Tuvok when I started, but I could later on. They
would just think B’Elanna didn’t have a big role in my first fic. Or, writers who
feel they’ve improved by broadening their horizons into slash or smut haven’t
improved in the eyes of their slash or smut fans, because those fans never
knew the writer before she entered that subgenre. In any event, diversification
is not what comes to mind when the finger wags about Working Hard.

One’s faults in the area of grammar and spelling should be
covered up by a good beta reader - so while the author may know that she’s
finally mastered the difference between their, they’re and there, the reader
may never notice. Only the beta benefits.

But I’m beating around the bush. The truth is, I believe there is such a thing
as a born writer. I believe if the story just comes to you out of nowhere, you’re
a born writer. I believe if you read too much Jane Austen and start thinking
in Regency English, you have the ear of a born writer.
I believe, given a better secondary education than is usually displayed
on FFN, a born writer can write pretty good fanfic without any preliminary
Suffering For Her Art or Working Hard to Improve Herself.

I’m not saying that an Unborn Writer can’t strive to improve herself
and become a better writer. I’m sure it happens sometimes.
But that doesn’t mean it has to be Hard Work for everyone.
If people had warned me ahead of time that it took
hard work to write fan fiction, that the first stuff I wrote would be horrid, and that
maybe someday, in a few years, I would be Vastly Improved, I probably would
have run screaming the other way. I need another job like I need another
fandom. Fortunately, at the time I didn’t know
anyone who Knew Better™, so I just started typing away.

Maybe I enjoy writing too much to think of it as work.
Everyone sounds so…matronly to me when they wag their fingers and say
there’s no easy way. I won’t wag back saying there’s
no hard way. I won’t even fake an Italian accent and say we
can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way…

I will, however, say the muse made it all seem so easy.