Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I’ve been a dazed and confuzed non-combatant in the Great Blog War for some time now, but you know I can’t let a good debate lie. So I jumped into the Switzerland Blogback Skirmish and now suddenly I’m all over Seema’s and Lori’s blogs. The Blog War to End All Blog War has taught me one thing - you can link directly to a blogback. My blogging-back rant still stands, but it’s nice to know I don’t have to extract my offensive William James quote and requote it here. It’s nice to know that I do so solely for the sake of violating the Khitomer Accords one more time:

I was very pleased to see that T’Pol has her own poolboy. Lovely little war, this… And Seema was kind enough to assemble the links for me, or steal them from Lori, more likely:

On the Jemima’s Trek side, I posted DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe, my award-losing J/P fic, to ASC. (It seems to be open repost season in there. I feel a huge awards brouhaha coming on.) Fortunately, someone here at Jemima’s Trek has fans and minions: Jade won third place in the Purple Comet Coda Contest for Bygones. Congratulations, Jade!

(Note as of mid-January: the Guide has moved into the wiki. Check there for new additions.)

All due apologies to Anna if I shouldn’t be linking her this way, but my sister Veronica is clueless about blogs and I wouldn’t want her getting all confused reading Demon Casablanca Blog backwards. I’m tempted to suggest that Anna do the whole thing up as a Virtual Season - I’d even volunteer - but fortunately for me and the promises I made myself never to Season Virtually again, I don’t know Anna from Adam. Whew.

So here are the direct links (and some temporary ones) in chronological order:

There is some blog in the blog entries, too - you can skim it if it confuses you.

What I need is a few good minions - people to do all that posting-to-lists fandom footwork for me. I’ve seen it done on the Buffy/Spike lists, so apparently there are minions out there to be had. Of course, it may be gauche to keep minions; I don’t know enough about Buffydom to know that. I do know enough about posting over and over to lists, indices and newsgroups not to want to know whether minioning is frowned upon.

So, anyone wanna be my minion?

<crickets chirping>

Darn…

Feedback watch

I finally got around to posting 148 to the Buffy/Spike lists, and I got three pieces of feedback in one hour for my efforts. Now that’s what I call instant gratification. If fandom were all Buffy fans, feedback would be easier to come by.

The zendom backup site has the zen feedback page mirrored. Feedback - its time has come!

New fic: 148 - all Spike, all the time, and one long spoiler for “After Life”. It’s short, written by the muse (you can tell by the first-person POV - I know better than to write in first-person), and then rewritten by her when Jintian, in her oh-so-politic way, pointed out that the muse had made half the stuff up. Somehow that was never an issue with Voyager…

I get the funny feeling that my three Spuffy lists are populated by all the same people. It’s like JetC, except instead of forty lists of thirty people each, there are four lists of five hundred people each. Unless I’ve missed one…

I’ll try to put up 148 tonight. And as soon as I have the Lori&Jemima story link from Seema, I’ll put that up too. You’ll laugh, you’ll scratch your head, you’ll laugh some more…

It’s late, I’m still editing those Buffy fics, but I had some thoughts that must get blogged:

One, I’ve tracked down my muse. Not to get her to write on command, but I’ve figured out what she writes, and what I write. It’s not as simple as saying she writes the good stuff and I crank out the puff pieces, though that would be close. The muse writes the first-person stories (”The Dance”, “Ambassador”, “148″), the mythic short-stories embedded in other fics (”A Maquis Holiday”, “Marriage is Irrelevant”), and, of course, the vastly underappreciated filks (”The Wreck of the Voyager”, “Chakotay”, “Yesterday, When I was Borg”). Sorry I didn’t link all those - they’re all on the Voyager page, except “148″ which is BtVS to appear.

My other thought of the night comes from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, the movie. That was a cheeseball bit of writing on Joss Whedon’s part, and I think it’s what makes him a fanfic writer. We all write fanfic because we take the show too seriously (I have a whole theory of Taking Things Too Seriously, which is going to have to wait for my next turn at bat on Zendom), and The Great Bird of the Hellmouth seems to have taken his Vampire/Teen B-movie too seriously in exactly the same way.

And he keeps on doing it… I know I should be working on that novel, but I Keep On Doing It Too, in scary capital letters. I Can’t Help It. Somebody Stop Me…

What’s the deal with Yahoogroups? It took me days to get onto the BetterBuffyFics list and link it to my YahooID.

Thank the gypsies I kept trying, though, because I’ve already read some Better Buffy Fic, by Avalon. She was a J/C writer once, too - maybe that explains her appeal.

On the down side of Better Buffy Fic, I tried another link to a fic whose prose was far too wooden for me to get into. It was on fanfiction.net and had literally hundreds of glowing reviews, which makes me bitter because the one fic I posted there (A Light Beyond) got one review. Count it, one. Fanfiction.net went down for a month a few hours after I posted it, but it’s the principle of the thing.

Ahem. I wasn’t going to beg for feedback. Since I still have the account, I should post my Buffy fic there, just to see what happens.

Did someone declare an International Day of Feedback and not tell me? In the few short hours I’ve been awake (yes, I was up all night writing an “After Life” episode insertion), I’ve gotten feedback for my Buffy filk (from a fellow filker, of course) and for three old Voyager stories (The Unity of the Multiverse, Thrive, and The Bottle of Bajoran Blue Wine, for those of you who still remember the agony and the ecstasy that was VOY).

To be fair, one of the feedbackers wasn’t sure that I wrote Thrive. Maybe B’Elanna wrote that one…it’s hard to recall the details now. VOY is getting all misty and rosy on me. (We have a word in Portuguese for the sort of nostalgia you have for the old country that you fled as fast as the steamship would carry you away at the time: saudades.) But honestly, Feedbackers Appearing from the Woodwork, I wasn’t begging for mail. B’Elanna’s awards are enough recognition for me, until I round up that elusive Hugo.

Why do I do it, if not for the feedback? Well, in the words of The Great Bird of the Hellmouth,

I’ll admit that my prejudice against Angel was irrational, not unlike my prejudice against Janeway’s annoying old flames, Mark and Justin. Reading about them in fanfic just made me queasy. I put up with it when I was a young VOY fan, but now I just stop reading when Angel shows up in fic - I even stopped reading Phoenix Burning, and I was really enjoying that until the wet blanket of Buffydom appeared.

I say it was irrational because I’ve just seen “Graduation Day” (both parts), an excellent example of the wisdom of my anti-Angel instincts. Not only is Angel annoying in principle, he’s downright infuriating in practice. The boy is built like a Volvo with the personality to match. Ok, so some people like the 70’s neanderthal look - eyebrows that obscure your eyes are not the real issue here. There’s no accounting for taste, as I learned from Voyager, when people watching other UPN stations were seeing Cute Icheb while we poor folks within range of UPN38 were subjected to Butt-Ugly Icheb.

No, the real problem with everyone’s favorite poolboy is that he can’t act his way out of a paper bag. That’s fine if you’re a starship captain, but I’ve come to expect more from BtVS. As far as I could tell, Angel had one, petulant, expression, and it wasn’t very expressive at that. He sucked the life out of every scene he appeared in. How I wished Faith had gone for the heart…

Consider, if you will, the closing scene of “Graduation Day”, where Angel is (thank the gypsies) leaving. He stands off in the mist and aims his one, all-purpose, expression at Buffy. What the actor cannot convey is left to the mist and the imagination. Casablanca it’s not.

Compare and contrast the scene in “After Life” where Spike first sees the resurrected Buffy. There’s genuine affection in his expression, enough to hold the camera by himself, without mist. Spike has a personality. In fact, all the other characters have personality - it seems only Angel got a be a wet-blanket for free card.

Volvo-boy isn’t getting one from me.