Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Seema went unrecognized in AAA, but she’s been voted Best Author by ASC. She also raked in the story awards, especially in VOY. Penny came in second, and Monkee third.

My holiday story won second place in its diminutive category, and I got a couple of other awards, too. When I get home I’ll put up the 2001 results on my Trek links page, with the ones I keep there from the last few years.

Right now I’m installing more mac stuff for work, so I’ll just leave you with a philosophical question: If a fan snarks in the blogs and nobody notices, was it really mean-spirited?

Thanks to a link from Lori, I stumbled into The Fannish Potlatch, a sociological take on all those famous fan follies and the definitive answer to the question, Why is so-and-so so popular when she can’t write her way out of a paper bag?

On a completely different subject, Jade has a new story up: Carpet of Blossoms.

What does The Newsgroup Recommend, Seema? Inquiring minds want to know…

Persistency of Poetry
Matthew Arnold, 1867

Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth today,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.

Someone inscribed that to me once, when we were young and we wrote other people’s words, sang other people’s songs, believed other people’s beliefs. It seems a long, long time ago, but I’m in the mood for saudades tonight - that doesn’t translate, so let us say, I’m in a melancholy mood.

I’m not sure why. It could still be the let-down after ASC and AAA voting, or it could be the fandom-goes-on feeling I get when people close down glass onion and unsubscribe from zendom and wander off into fandoms where I cannot follow, or it could just be some existential fallout from reading The Curse of Chalion.

Everyone burns out eventually (except possibly Seema). Fandom is a revolving door through which pass many self-proclaimed whores. Maybe we’re fated to be this way, because of the fundamental illegitimacy of fan writing in the eyes of the world. Real writers don’t burn out after a fanonical three years; they’re barely getting started. There are what, fourteen books listed in the front of Curse of Chalion? And LMB was just a housewife with a hobby when she started.

Maybe the problem is that we can never turn this hobby of ours into a cottage-industry. Not only will we never get paid, we’ll never get respect. I showed my lovely sister Veronica some feedback I got in the ASC awards, but she didn’t seem to understand. Look, I’ve done something! The muse was with me, and I touched the sky.

Ok, I’ve done other things, and I have the sheepskins to prove it, but education is a terribly narrow, specialized thing these days - one people don’t understand, but they respect you for it anyway. They don’t respect you for fanfiction, no matter how big your big name. No one will ever know.

Maybe I’m sad because I’m more likely to be published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic than in Analog. You’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not full of myself or obsessed with awards; I’m just a spectator here, the alien/Borg/INTP come down to observe and meta-comment. I understand that people look to fandom for fun - I certainly had nothing else in mind two years ago, reading through the J/C Index during a slow week at work. I had no ambitions of becoming a BNF when the muse came to me and forced me to write Marriage is Irrelevant, and I still don’t.

I want to be a Real Writer, but I know that real sci-fi writers get about as much respect as fanfic writers do. I could grow up to be LMB and people still wouldn’t know my name; they don’t know hers. The race, as the man said, is not to the swift. The Pulitzer is not to the strong. Lori calls it a game, one Yvonne is also tired of, one that burns out its writers almost as efficiently as fandom does - almost. And yet, and yet, there is something more solid about print, something slow and considered and restful, something more serious and less esoteric than the FFF’s of fandom.

I started out in a jetc list that hid the big bad world of fandom from the happy fish of snack-fic, but eventually I found my way around. I met some cool people, and before I knew it, I’d met all the cool people (not to mention the not-so-cool people). And that was it, that was the whole shebang. Some people keep on looking for more shebang, though - either in new shows, or in slash, or in carrying the torch virtually, or in little clubs that exist solely to show the world that so-and-so is cooler than the average fan.

Maybe it’s the final evidence that fanfic is not an art: we end up looking for more and not finding it, and leaving. Oh, we talk about getting better, about improving our writing, but in practice, we wander off to other fandoms, exotica or erotica. Fandom is social, but writing is individual - maybe that conflict is what tears us apart from our muses and our shows and one another.

So they can call me Queen of the Filk (Penny) or Jemima Austen (Lori) or Our Lady of the AU (Liz), but my show is over and gone, and with it went B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse. In the blizzard of blogs and lists flying apart and virtual seasons and revolving-door newsgroups, she caught her death of cold. Here I am, for reasons I hardly understand, wondering if I should just let her rest in peace.

Fandom is us, tooting our own horns, paying our own fic taxes, reading our own fic. We cannot go up and in here, we can only fly round and round, because we are the whole shebang. Why isn’t that enough?

Strange New Fanfic

It seems like I’ve been voting for the whole month of April. On the one hand, the big contests have been a good chance to catch up on the VOY fic I’ve been ignoring since the series ended a year ago. On the other hand, it’s been a lot of slogging through categories full of uninspiring fic, only to discover that the writers I’ve always thought were very good are still getting all my votes, and the writers I used to think were at least good for a few kilobytes’ amusement just don’t do it for me anymore.

I don’t blame them. The more I write, the more I beta as I read and little sins of characterization and style I once overlooked have become showstoppers for me. I rarely finish a fic for the plot the way I used to, if the writing doesn’t hold up.

I ought to be sorry for my loss. It’s not just fanfic, either - I’m finding it hard to dig up good scifi these days, and I used to read anything I could get my hands on. I was in a used bookstore last week (Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury Street, if any locals are looking for used sci-fi - there’s more there than at Pandemonium in Cambridge) and didn’t find much that appealed to me. On a whim, I picked up Strange New Worlds IV - I don’t buy pay-per-fic, but in this case it was used so Paramount hasn’t made any money off me. (Sorry about the royalties, Penny. Tell me how much you would have gotten and I’ll mail it to you.) I was hoping it would shake me out of my fanfic doldrums.

At least the stuff was well-written, with a few minor exceptions. There was only one story in there that made me glad I’d bought the book - it was Personal Log by Kevin Killiany, a story about the EMH. Of course, Penny’s story was excellent, but I can have more and better Penny at the click of a link. I would give the awards out differently, too. Sticking to the pattern of at most one per series:

1. Personal Log (VOY)
2. A Little More Action (TOS)
3. The Promise (TNG)

None of my pics actually won a prize, and I didn’t care for the stories that did win, especially the first place winner. The VOY prize recipient was one of the few crew stories in the book, and it wasn’t bad, though rather rushed and disjointed. I’m still not sure what happened - it was very much like an episode in its technobabble, plot holes, and brief, pat dialogue at the end.

What struck me most about the book, and therefore, I suppose, the contest, was the topics of the stories. They were mostly character vignettes, and they leaned heavily toward very minor characters, skirting, and often breaking, the contest rule that stories should be about main or familiar characters. Just to drive home the point, I’ll make a character code list of the main characters in SNW4:

TOS: an OC from the gangster planet with some Kirk, Spock and McCoy; David Marcus; tribbles and crew; a Horta; the Enterprise herself; Kirk; Scotty; McCoy

TNG: an old robot with some Picard and company; Kamin (Picard’s persona from “Inner Light”); Ro Laren; Ian Andrew Troi; Lt. Hawk (don’t ask me who that is)

DS9: Captain Proton; an OC doctor from the 1950’s (this story won, probably for its PC content)

VOY: A Borg Queen and Q (this was a TNG story); Gretchen Janeway (was she ever on VOY, or is she just a Jeri Taylorism?); Trevis (of Trevis and Flotter fame); Paris and Kim; the EMH; the crew; the crew

The structure of the stories was also weighed towards the unusual, with a third of the stories written in the first person, one with a tense shift, one in Borgvision, one in the POV of a heretofore inanimate object, one too terse to make sense, two written as journals, and even a Captain Proton script. I get the feeling the editors are as jaded by Trek stories as I am, and are going for the exotic like some third-year fanfic writer getting into slash.

I take this as evidence that SNW isn’t about fan fiction. No one would sit through these many OC’s passed off as non-MIS stories in a fanfiction forum. What it is, is more pay-per-fic - stories without any meaningful personal interaction between the main characters (with the notable exception of the Paris and Kim story), which branch off into OC’s because that’s the only way to slip a real story with real character development past Paramount.

I’m still avoiding my mailbox. I finished voting in ASC, really, finally, this time. Although I can look through a story category and read everything that’s relatively good (and reread the ones that were really good), I find it much harder to face the author categories. I just don’t know enough about most authors to make a generalization about their work, and I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already said about individual stories.

The only thing I’ve gotten out of the author categories is the idea that I ought to be reading James Winter. I tried Barbara Watson, and I didn’t get far, unfortunately. I trust the people who’ve raved about her, but…it’s all comes down to time.

First sentence rule, people - the first sentence has to tell the reader where you’re going, and that they want to go there with you. Or the first paragraph, at least, and if you can’t do that, then the summary better promise a lot of Borg. Fandom is just like the editor’s desk that way - you have a very limited time to grab me, and them I’m on to the next NEW VOY.

Meg sucked me into her Borgstory - I never got the chance to say, “I don’t have time for this.” Barbara gave me that chance. I have my own fic to write, so I’m going to leap at any excuse to bail out of a story.

Speaking of bailing out, do I face the flooded inbox, or do I go back to voting in AAA? Only ten voting days left…

I can’t believe I voted the whole thing…

Technically, I’m not done with the ASC Awards yet - there’s best author, and I have no excuse like “I don’t read authors,” the way I did for “I don’t read P/T.”

If you must go and vote for me just to spoil my blog arguments, try not to make it so obvious. Sheesh, try to make a point around here…

Are They Blogging About Me?

Someone mentioned a blog, and I surfed around a bit and read Lori’s half of her pseudoblogchat with Teague. I said something to Christine recently about why I hadn’t posted Thrive to ASC this year. Part of it was the time of year that I wrote it - I don’t have time to post or read new stuff during the ASC Awards season, which tends to last from February to April, somehow. Also, I have a different standard when posting to ASC than when posting to a newsgroup of J/C fanatics, for example. I shouldn’t say a different standard, I should say, I have a standard.

And that leads to the question, not of whether I underrate my own fic and am femininely modest about it, but of how one rates fic in the first place. I know I have a standard, but I’m far from knowing what it is. What disturbed me about “Thrive”? I told Christine I didn’t want to be an intense writer, that angst is to characterization as the drabble is to structure. (Ok, maybe I didn’t say that, but I’m saying it now.) I don’t go by what people like - I like my stories, every last one, every last word of them, but that doesn’t mean that I know how other people feel about them.

For instance, take the very best thing I wrote this past year, the tragic, inspired work that haunted me for weeks afterwards - Yesterday, When I Was Borg. It was a filk. I admit, from a technical standpoint, it may not have been as good as “Wreck of the Voyager”, but it’s my favorite nonetheless. So far, it’s garnered one pity-vote from Seema in the ASC Awards. (I’m not begging for more votes - they would spoil my point here.)

Now you can go and vote for “The Dance” all you want, but what am I to think of the reading public’s appreciation for 225k of “The Museum”, when they clearly have no feeling for even those few brief stanzas of genius in which Seven mourns, “Yesterday, the cube was green; a million burning stars, still waiting to be seen…”? Well?

That’s something of a facetious example, but I mean it to demonstrate that the author’s relationship to her work (and through it, to her readers) is something that can’t be easily pinned down to agreeing or disagreeing with the general opinion of fandom. In other words, maybe I’m not suspicious of my stories; maybe I’m suspicious of my readers.

Or maybe it’s something else entirely…

High Fic vs. Low Fic

Another thing I’ve noticed about the VOY section of the ASC Awards this year is the prevalence of humor far beyond the humor category. Anywhere Liz goes, humor follows, and the Die Seven Die category only compounded the giggling.

Humor is fine in its place, but it’s hardly High Fic. Here’s my personal ranking of fanfic genres, plus annotations of what most sane people would change about it. The order is high fic to low fic.

1. Adventure
2. Filk (most people would call it low fic)
3. Romance
4. Character stories
5. Humor
6. Vignettes
7. Drabbles
8. Angst (most people would call this high fic)
9. Haiku
10. Slash
11. Smut
12. Real people fic

I’m not sure which order slash and smut should be in - I put slash first because the writers seem to think they’re saying something more than smut alone would say, if it said anything at all.

One Hit Wonders

I’ve been voting for the same people over and over again in the ASC awards and at AAA. It’s not just that they’re my friends, it’s also that they seem to write everything, or at least almost everything good. There seem to be very few one-hit wonders in fandom. Maybe the author of Lt. Keegan (in ASC in the Voyager Lower Decks category) is one - I don’t think I ever managed to get through with my feedback, a sure sign of disappearance, but I don’t know whether there were hits before that particular one.

I’d post another song from Buffy Anne Supergirl, but I have more voting to do first. If you want something good to read, hop over to Zendom for Christine’s article.

Yes, it’s been a while. I blame blogger. I’m thinking about moving to Moveable Type - every time I want to blog, blogger is down.

The ASC Awards are in progress - you can vote at the Trekiverse site. On the fictional side, my filk of JCS is almost done. Here’s another excerpt to make up for my blogging neglect: