Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I suppose I shouldn’t let it get to me when strangers several blogs and blogbacks away say they think I’m full of myself. It didn’t occur to me that Victoria would take down that particular blog entry - I’m still not sure she did, since I don’t know much about livejournals. Anyway, feel free to put it back up if you did take it down. The damage was already done, anyway. Next time I just won’t click on the comments link, since I know it won’t be pretty.

I probably shouldn’t have been so blunt in my previous post, either. Again, it was the people at a fourth remove who got insulted, and Victoria, despite, or perhaps because of, her misinterpretation, had some interesting things to say.

For instance, she suggested that people use the muse metaphor out of longstanding habit. I’m sure some people talk about the muse without any real internal referent, just because they hear it bandied about so much. Yet that cannot explain the persistence of the muse in general - no one talks about Apollo, though we still have war. Fanfic writers don’t talk about spleen or bile, though these metaphors lived from ancient Greece well into modern times.

I’m getting too apologetic in my old age. My original purpose for this post was just to link the new muses category. (Categories are just another cool feature brought to you by Moveable Type, like comments that don’t slow the page download to a crawl.) Some older musey musings have been included, which make a start towards the musobiography Lori requested.

[This entry has been edited from the original rant.]

Yes, I’m uninterested in engaging in a discussion with people who seem incapable of separating personal opinion from personal insult, or who have related difficulties distinguishing between what I’ve actually said and what they think I’ve said, or who think I’m capable of hobbling the English language singlehandedly because I prefer strong words to weak ones. I’m willing to do it in zendom (much as it annoys Christine) but not here. See later entries for why. To the end of not discussing, I’ve edited this entry down to a more average episode of Jemima’s Blog.

I blamed Lori, rebel-in-training, for saying that museful writing was better than museless writing. I never said it. (Watch a future muse entry for my opinion on that issue.) She says she never said it that way either, which means the people who read it that way were hallucinating.

More on colloquialisms:

I find them unclear. As a writer, I have to choose between strong words and weak words. Fun and happy are weak words, ones I’d be very cautious of putting into the mouth of a character (only partly because most of my writing is set in the future where current colloquialisms stand out as bad writing) and equally cautious of using in a discussion, where they lead to confusion.

The aside:

I’m not here to encourage good writing. I don’t know where anyone got that idea. This is my blog, and I’m here to express my opinions, and, when the muse strikes, to write fanfic. The rest of you can save fandom from itself - I’ve done my time.

On the sweating and the bleeding:

Note that I have never and will never claim that sweating and bleeding for your writing is worthwhile, sane, productive, or any other such thing. Since I dislike most mainstream literature, my exposure to the hurt me school of writing has been through fanfic, where I’ve seen a fraction of writers boast of having to cut each word out of their flesh, or at least sweat or bleed for their writing. It still surprises me when people say that, and that attitude is as alien to the muse as is writing for fun.

As for what is native to the muse, see the later muse entries.

Have you heard of remote sensing? I seem to be an expert in remote annoying.
My own personal thoughts on the muse have filtered
down through Lori’s and Victoria’s blogs into the hands of the museless, which means,
at the very least, that I’m going to have to switch the category on the first muse entry to
fanfic [moved again to muses], so the unintended muse war is all in one
place, for fuming reference.

Here I am, not apologizing again. This is my blog and I’m not going to be
diplomatic. If you want diplomacy, Lori’s blog is right there in the link list. I’m not
full of myself; I just happen to have my own opinions. If you don’t like them,
then, as we say in the industry, click off.

Well, that being said, I’ve had an interesting muse-related experience lately.
I used to say I loved all my fic equally, flaws and all. I used to write them, edit
them, then put them down and never look back. It’s not that I wouldn’t edit them
to death, at the time, but I never let them sit for editing reasons. I only put them
aside when the muse flagged (or turned C/7 and refused to finish J/C fic), until
the muse returned.

Recently, however, I reread most of my fic. I still loved them all, and wouldn’t
retouch a word except for misspellings (which I do fix) and repeated uses of the
same word close together (which I don’t bother to fix). There was one exception,
though, Colony, my old novel.
Christine was right about it back when I wrote it,
and if I had the time now, I might do a Lori-scale revision of the thing. It’s so…uneven.
It’s depressing, really - I’m not sure I’d know where to start if I were fixing it.
All I know is that it started dragging in the middle and I gave up reading. If its own
mother can’t read it, it’s got to be pretty bad.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Congratulations to all the secret agents, and good luck with those acceptance speeches. As promised, I’ve added the 2001 ASC results to my Voyager links page. In a flurry of markup activity, I also added the appropriate graphics to B’Elanna’s Award Shelf. (Click to see what B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse won, if you really want to know.) It took me a while, mostly trying to convince the paragraphs to clear: left and updating the story index as well.

I fondly remember the days when I would have free time left in the day after a site update for, say, writing fic. Speaking of which, Jade has entered Carpet of Blossoms in the Ripples in the Pond AU contest. There’s an interesting discussion of AU vs. canon writers going on in zendom, which will eventually turn into an Easter Egg Vinegar column. Don’t touch that dial!

On the Buffy side (spoiler alert! run away! run away!), Dr. Deb and I were cheering Anyanka on yesterday as she tried to get her well-deserved revenge upon Xander, World’s Wussiest Wuss. The magic wasn’t going too well, so she ended up doing it the old-fashioned way. You go, demon girl!

On the Mac side, I installed fink today, so I could get some utilities I needed for work. (Fink is Mac is Unix on speed.) The instructions were a little terse, but once I slowed down and read the help screens, it was like magic. I’ve spent literally hours of my life trying to install XFree86 on Linux machines, and fink just did it by itself while I had my back turned. XDarwin is cool, very, very cool.

Let’s see, are there any categories I missed?