Content eludes me today, so how about a few links?
Plumb the depths of 404 at the
404 Research Lab. Read a
Jim Wright-style review of the classic TOS episode “Mirror Mirror” at
Television Without Pity.
Find that elusive C/7 masterpiece at
Perfection, home of the C/7 Story
Index.
What if you had to put together a list of Chakotay fic? It would be hard,
wouldn’t it? Translate it into Japanese and you get
Club Tattoo.
(I’m dying to know what they’re saying about me.)
For previous Blog War entries, see the wiki.
“They want us to hold a press conference.” Jemima sounded less than enthused.
Seema, however, was in her element. “Set up the soapboxes, boys!” she called out to the poolboys sunning themselves on the deckchairs. Sean in his speedo bumped into Jemima’s new poolboy, Liam Neeson, overdressed in a Soviet naval uniform. Words in funny accents were exchanged. Liz, to keep up her battered image of aloofness, had Snape move her soapbox a little farther away from the others, closer to the pool. Spike and Liam unfolded a few rows’ worth of the resort folding chairs, lining them up in front of the soapboxes.
“Let ‘em in!” Seema pointed the way to their seats. “Aren’t you folks supposed to be at the White House? What brings you all to our humble pool?” They weren’t poolboy material, that much was certain.
The reporters all answered at once, drowning each other out. “War,” one said, after the others had grown silent. “Stone Electrons,” he introduced himself, “reporting for the Blog News Service.”
“Never heard of it,” Liz muttered.
“You’re a little late,” Seema said. “The blog war started, oh, about eight months ago. You should have stopped by when we were at the Death Star.”
“Which Death Star?” Stone asked.
Seema shrugged. “They all look alike to me.”
Stone shifted uncomfortably in his seat; Snape stood nearby, looking innocent. “I believe this is a different blog war,” Stone said, leaning over to scratch his legs.
“There can be only one blog war,” Liz said, slipping momentarily into Highlander fandom in her unique multi way. She loosened her longsword in its scabbard.
“So that’s what’s under the cloak,” Lori whispered to Christine.
Stone was speechless, but another reporter filled in the gap. “Is Jemima going to apologize for her inflammatory remarks?”
“Which ones?” Lori asked.
“‘A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end,’” Seema quoted. “Do you mean that one?” The reporters looked at her blankly. “I was there for that one - it was messy.”
“I remember when she said a mailing list with no email on it was dead,” Christine said. “That didn’t go over well, either.”
“I know,” Lori said, “it must have been ‘Sex does not advance the plot.’ The resort was in an uproar for days over that one.” The White House press corps was nonplussed. They didn’t seem to know much about Jemima, after all.
Liz shook her head. “It must be that she called people without muses ‘museless’. Now, that was a blog-wide scandal.” No response.
“What exactly did Jemima say this time?” Seema asked.
Stone Electrons stopped scratching for a moment. “Jemima is a C/7 fan.” One of the reporters fainted, but the figures on the soapboxes were unmoved. “She thinks she’s better than J/C writers.”
“When did Jemima ever say that?” Christine asked. “Do you have a source, Mr. Electrons?”
“Several bloggers have said–”
“I meant a reliable source,” Christine interrupted. “Or is defamation the standard policy of the Blog News Service? You’d better get your story straight - it’s all going in my docket.”
Stone leaped out of his seat, but it wasn’t the specter of the law that had frightened him. The fire ants had finally reached his derriere. Unable to shake them off, he ran out of the Zen Resort in a mad panic. Snape’s self-satisfied expression wasn’t lost on the other reporters, who began to collect their notepads and edge away.
Jemima cleared her throat. “I would like to make it perfectly clear that I have never claimed to be better than other J/C writers. Honestly. I mean, Penny is a J/C writer.” There was a general hush as an angel of light appeared over the pool, walking towards them across the water and playing an unearthly melody on a golden harp. “Monkee is a J/C writer.” The angel vanished and the ABBA appeared in her place, wearing six-foot platform shoes which kept them above water. They broke into a rousing rendition of ‘Dancing Queen.’
“Do you admit that your website is yellow?” one last reporter shouted over the din.
Jemima clapped her hands together. “That reminds me! This month marks the two-year anniversary of Jemima’s Trek, proving fanfic and entertainment in lovely TOS technicolor and standards-compliant html since August 2000. We need to celebrate.” She turned to Lori. “Do you think the ABBA would sing ‘Fernando’ with my lyrics?”
“It’s your blog.”
“Indeed.” She had Sean run off four sunshine yellow copies of ‘Chakotay’ on Lori’s color printer and swim out to the ABBA to deliver them. Spike chased out the press and let in the members of CSFic. Snape handled the drinks, Jade brought cookies and Jemima hummed along.
Can you hear their guns Chakotay?
I remember long ago another starry void like this
In the firefight Chakotay
You were humming to yourself as I was cursing Gul Evek
I could hear his pompous threats
And sounds of phaser fire coming through the deck…
I’m just trying to write a little Garak/7 fic here, and I can’t find the DS9
Encyclopedia. It used to be at
http://ds9enc.www2.50megs.com/ds9enc.htm,
but if you go there now and wait ten minutes you’ll get a message claiming it’s
moved to
http://ds9encyclopedia.0catch.com/,
the catch being that the encyclopedia exceeded 0catch’s bandwidth limit and has
been blocked.
So where is it? What kind of fandom can’t find bandwidth for its biggest
website, the one that’s linked everywhere? It’s as if Delta Blues
were down and out and no one said a thing about it.
Seema, I’m holding you personally responsible.
I’m two years old this month, and in response to yet another poll on
Zendom I wrote up my thoughts on my first fanfic (by start date rather than
completion):
Title: Marriage
is Irrelevant
Author: Jemima
Series: VOY
Date: July-September 2000
This was my first fanfic, and also my first work of fiction.
I was pushed over the edge after a few weeks of heavy reading of the
Janeway/Chakotay Story Index, specifically when I read a story in which
Janeway gets amnesia and forgets she’s married to Chakotay. I thought
the more interesting question was how they’d gotten married in the first
place - I came to the conclusion that it must have required serious
professional help. Or rather, the muse came to the conclusion and
pestered me with the story for days before I started typing it up for her.
This story was 100k long, with a focus on the alien professionals and Tom
Paris, universal narrator and screw-up, and a certain weakness in the areas
of B’Elanna and Tuvok which it took me quite a while to get over. You can tell
from the title that my interest in Seven of Nine goes back to the very beginning. A few other common factors from my writing, such as short stories about aliens embedded in the longer story and, of course, marriage, also made their debut in this fic.
It took me about three months to write the thing, starting exactly two years
ago. I could finish a story of that length more quickly now. I had no clue
what I was doing and I suffered from perfectionism, so I worked over the
story until I practically knew it by heart. I’m sure it suffers from wandering
POV, since I was still wandering a year and half later when I wrote my first
Buffy fic.
MII is one of my favorites among what I’ve written - I’m not
ashamed of it, but then I never posted it to ASC. I wrote other stories
while this one was in progress and posted those to ASC (one won an award);
it wasn’t my writing
I was reluctant to let out, but the sappy theme deterred me. I try to restrict
the sap to fora where it’s welcome.
Yet more demands of poor fanfic writers - Bjorn wants less tunnel-vision:
An unnamed SG-1 fan wants scientific accuracy. Others want more style,
or less style, more plot or less plot, a sprinkle of this and a dash of that.
Lori responds to some of these demands with her diplomatic
version of my favorite saying, Have you ever seen TOS?
For Bjorn I’ll translate it, Do you read sci-fi?
Yes, it would be nice if we
could all plot perfectly, write like the poets, display a perfect understanding of
human nature, know every last factoid about our subject matter, and predict
the cultural impact of science down to painting the moon blue. There’s just
one little problem - it’s impossible.
No one omits plot because of a personal prejudice against it. Writers write
bad plots because that’s the best they can do. No one says, today I’ll
make my prose dull and leaden - they do the best they can. If a writer
seems to get by on just plot (as many genre novelists do), that means they’re
being read despite their disabilities, not because of
them. If a fanfic writer does the Mary Sue, it’s not because she’s decided that
being reviled by fandom would be a nice change of pace - she merely lacks
the skill to conceal herself.
Bjorn takes the failure of fanfic writers at what is arguably the hardest
challenge in
fiction today, that is, inventing and conveying future cultural changes caused by
scientific innovation, and equates it with tunnel vision. It’s these
outright demands for genius that are the real tunnel vision of the genre
discussion. Bjorn is far from the first to demand it; he was just the
most recent with his roundabout way of asking,
Why aren’t you Ursula LeGuin?
There need be no deeper reason for the deficiencies of genre and fanfic
than the simple one that writing is hard. No psychoanalysis or classification is
necessary. If you want it done better, you’re going to have to do it yourself.
Lori is still quoting Minisoo, and I now see that according to Minisoo’s definition,
I would be a cathartic writer, because I don’t care about my audience in her sense
of caring. But I am not actually cathartic, according to
the dictionary definition Lori provided. Although I wouldn’t choose to write without
the muse, the muse is by no means forcing me to write; it is not the monkey on
my back Lori portrays her muse as being.
I usually am quite literal about the muse, but when I say the muse made
me write my first fic, that’s not quite true. The muse came up with the story and
pestered me with thoughts of Ymn for a few nights before I took out the laptop
and typed it up for her, but that was not true catharsis. I didn’t feel relieved.
I just started more stories and the muse snowballed. If I wanted to get the
muse off my back, I would never have let her near a keyboard. I would have
gone cold-turkey. I’ve written
enough in my life to know that writing is not something you can do just
this once, as an experiment. Writing is like thinking - once you start,
you can’t stop. One doesn’t normally try to exorcise thoughts.
Tracing it back to the source blog, there isn’t much left to the distinction
between the alleged storyteller and cathartic writer.
Either one can write well, either one can write badly, either one can write
because of the muse, either one can feel catharsis. The only distinction that
Minisoo holds up the whole way is that she, in the guise of
storytellers, has a dynamic going with the audience that the
other camp does not. First off, this isn’t true - the main dynamic for most
writers is not with
the audience but with the fanon and possibly a beta reader or two.
Minisoo makes clear that she has some sort of cultural ideal of storytelling
behind her statements, but she doesn’t make a good case for a real
feedback loop in writing.
Fanon, as in the general written body of fanfic,
tells you much more about what is and isn’t an appropriate story than the
audience does directly. Secondly, the storytelling/catharsis split cuts straight
across Sarah T.’s distinction between aesthetic (good) and
social (bad) writers.
Yes, good and bad again. Whether it started out this way, this discussion
has turned into a game of peg the badfic writers. In Minisoo’s
scheme (as filtered through Lori), the badfic writers are a subset of the
cathartic (antisocial) writers. On Sarah’s continuum, the badfic writers are at
the social end.
Just that part alone tells me that this is a personality debate, not a real
discussion of fanfic. It is, therefore, not going to end, as someone else
mentioned. But at least it’s made me think once again about motive in fanfiction.
(I have had the feeling since the whole muse blog blowout that the
misinterpretation of my statements about the muse had a lot to do with
statements I made in Zendom a while back about ulterior motives in
fanfiction.)
The current debate is about fanfic writers’ motives for writing. I believe
that if someone can tell your motive for writing your story, then it’s a bad
story. If someone can tell your motive for writing fanfic in general, then
you’re a bad writer. In a way, this is what people are saying. When Sarah T.
can tell you’re writing in order to socialize, she calls that bad fic. When
Lori can psychoanalyze you based on your writing, she calls that bad fic.
If I even suspect certain ulterior motives, I’m outta there.
I’ve never said that my reason for writing is the real reason,
because as far as I’m concerned, the writer’s motive is irrelevant unless it
happens to reach out and hit the reader on the head with an anvil (bad!).
From the reader’s end (and in judging fic, we do it as the reader), there is
only one good reason for writing a story: the story itself.
Not the audience, not catharsis, not your social set, not aesthetics, not
dysfunction, just the story.
If you have another motive, keep it to yourself. I get enough anvils
on the head from Joss.
Lori blogged about
motivation
in fanfic, and I said: You said someone said, “For storytellers, it’s all
about the dynamic between writer/speaker and audience.” Then you went on to
say how the catharsis was also a cry to the audience. Where do people who
don’t write for an audience at all fit in?
I don’t have time to go back to the original blogs, since I’m going away to
a keyboardless place for the weekend, so I’m probably misinterpreting some of
this blogversation. I’m not aiming for accurate representation; this is just my take
on the words and phrases being tossed around. You have been warned.
It looked to me like the source bloggers
were saying that good writers want to communicate with their audience and bad
writers are just doing a brain dump onto the keyboard without regard for their
audience. Lori did a little analysis of the more godawful and oversensitive of
the bad writers, saying that they also were communicating something to the
audience - a plea for approval, perhaps. I noticed that no one acknowledged
doing it purely for yourself as a legitimate (source blog) or
possible (Lori’s blog) option. (I’m sure Lori would have defended the introverts
if she’d had the time.)
I don’t think you have to be doing some “dynamic” thing with your
audience in order to be a good writer, and I don’t think that literary merit is
determined by anything but the audience’s enjoyment of the work. In fact,
a work that both rabid ’shippers with “no feeling for language
& no love of prose” and English professors slumming here in fandom
can appreciate has more true literary merit than
Pulitzer material that the average fan doesn’t enjoy. Shakespeare wrote to
both levels, and if we can’t do it, that’s our fault, not our readers’.
And Shakespeare is dead now, so he’s not doing anything dynamic with
his audience. It makes no difference today whether he was interested in his
audience or in his dysfunctions or in his next paycheck. Only the words
on paper matter.
Just a link to amuse Seema:
Blog
War Anonymous. (The link to make your own twelve-step program is
_____ Anonymous.)
There’s fresh blog war at
Your Guide
to the Blog Wars, and fresh character-lovin’ zen at
zendom.
