Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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.

Word count: 5 (49,995 to go)

But they’re the most important five words! Yes, I’ve come up with an opening line that summarizes the entire novel. In fact, it’s so telling that I can’t put it at the beginning where (everyone knows) the opening line that summarizes the entire novel goes. I’ll have to hide it after a dramatic, interest-grabbing prologue instead.

I know, the suspense is killing you. Here it is: “Tell me about your father.” Lovely in its triteness, it will slip by the reader like a greased pig. Other NaNoWriters may have stayed up all night to take advantage of their first piece of November; I went to bed. The muse needs her beauty rest if she’s going to pump out 50,000 words without even an outline.

Besides outlining, my wasted pre-NaNo weeks should have been devoted to research. I did manage to stop by the library for a pile of research material before it was, technically, November. It’s rare that I complete something hours before the deadline like that.

Speaking of planning, the obvious approach to NaNoWriMo is to divide 50,000 by 30 and come up with a daily word count of 1,667. That approach, while mathematically sound, is far too pedestrian for my work of speed-art. I prefer to divide 50,000 by 800 to get 63 scenes. That’s not quite round enough, though, so let’s divide 50,000 by 833 to get 60 scenes. That’s 2 scenes a day, a literary concept my muse can wrap her (stolen) mind around. One scene for breakfast and one for dinner, as it were.

Since it’s the afternoon already, I’m one scene behind. The weekend is clearly the time to catch up on such things, so I hope that by Sunday I’ll be back in the running. There’s no hope of my being the first to the finish line - there are 10,000 participants this year, I heard, and I’m no trilogy-writer like the fantasy people. This is just a little sci-fi novel that’s off to a slow start.

I gave a State of Zendom address earlier today.

What’s your inner fangirl? Take the test!

On a more serious note, I just read an article on dhimmitude and political correctness that someone had cut and pasted to a mailing list. The part of the controversy that most interested me was the doublespeak - the students who organized the dhimmitude lecture bent over backwards to say they didn’t know what they obviously did know, and that their objection was not to what was said, but how it was said, and that it was said in the first place.

It’s annoying when fangirls value niceness above honesty, but it’s frightening when college-age adults at an institution devoted to the pursuit of truth do so.

Every day, the company I work for edges closer and closer to its final resting place in the dot com graveyard. Tomorrow is moving day, when we give up part of our office space to save on the rent. There’s a certain attitude of despair percolating up through the eyes wide shut denial now. The issue of paying the rent has far too much resonance, I’d say. It’s a wonder we lasted this long. Nobody’s buying and nobody’s hiring.

As I was looking up dot com graveyard sites, I stumbled across this recent insult to bloggers everywhere. It’s on a slimy marketing site, but still, the attitude is awfully snarky. Maybe they feel threatened by ad-free, grassroots content.

Anything’s possible.

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.

I didn’t know, when I picked it up remaindered, that Starswarm was a children’s book. Despite several clues - the book was about children, and had an introduction that mentioned Robert Heinlein’s “juveniles” - I didn’t figure it out until I happened to take off the dust jacket and see the Jupiter imprint on the spine. I knew Tor had a young adult line, but I assumed they were kept in some YA section of bookstores.

Nevertheless, I kept reading Starswarm. The setup was interesting, despite the obvious King in Disguise plot. At some point, though, the author (Jerry Pournelle) decided he had discharged his descriptive duties and switched to talking-head, tell-as-you-go dialogue. Add the genetically modified dogs and the third cute kid and you get Scoobie Doo In Space. It was a fine cartoon, but I was expecting a book.

Neuromancer by William Gibson is the 1984 classic that is credited with launching the cyberpunk subgenre. I approached it with a sort of suspicious reverence. I have to admit that it was a good read, but not anything I’d want to carry on into an entire genre. I neither loved the characters nor loved to hate them, which made the book a rather flat experience despite the stylistic talents of the author. It reminded me of the old, hard-bitten school of sci-fi. They weren’t bad stories, but I can’t say I miss them.

What Weird Quote Are You?
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No, I didn’t cheat.

Which fandom archetype are you?
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I still need to get the BOFQ quiz up. I was going to do that for the zenniversary, but now there’s a speech to write. There are a few BOFQ quiz substitutes out there already:

Which fandom dinosaur are you?
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I had dropped the issue of badfic off my backblog list, but Lori linked an amazing article on the subject by Nick Lowe, The Well-Tempered Plot Device. It cannot be described, only excerpted:

…bad writing is governed by subtle rules and conventions of its own, every bit as difficult to learn and taxing to apply as those that shape good writing.
And while I’m about it I’ll propose a new definition of magic, account for the existence of Lionel Fanthorpe, and show you a way to derive pleasure from Stephen Donaldson books. (Needless to say, it doesn’t involve reading them. But neither does it involve burying them under six foot of badger manure and napalming the lot, which you might think the obvious answer.)

Yes, I did think that was the obvious answer. I’m not alone! (By the way, I’m blogging as I read the article, for that elusive first impression.) Ah, clench-racing… All I need is a few Catherine Asaro novels and some gullible friends and I can take up gentled-racing.

…I like to term this kind of thing Collect-the-Coupons plotting. It would be much too complicated to have three goodies overcome the whole usurping army, or at any rate it would be far beyond the plotting powers of a Lin Carter. So what you do instead is write into the scenario one or more Plot Coupons which happen to be “supernaturally” linked to the outcome of the larger action; and then all your character have to do is save up the tokens till it’s time to cash them in.

Obviously, this is an artifice which lends itself particularly well to fantasy writing, and is capable of widely varying subtlety of application. I think The Lord of the Rings, or Lord of the Plot Coupons, is the chief villain here, unless you want to trace it back to Wagner and his traditional sources.

Yes, the man is a genius. He goes on to explain how the author himself can appear in fiction:

One thinks irresistibly of Gandalf’s famous words to Frodo when explaining the logic of The Lord of the Plot Devices: “I can put it no plainer than by saying that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, and not by its maker.” Frodo, unfortunately, fails to respond with the obvious question, to which the answer is “by the author”. […]
But actually, it’s not always necessary for the author to put in an appearance himself, if only he can 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. It’ll call itself something like the Visualization of the Cosmic All, or Seldon’s Plan, or The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the Law, or the Light, or the Will of the Gods; or, in perhaps its most famous avatar, the Force. Credit for this justly celebrated interpretation of Star Wars belongs to Phil Palmer; I’d only like to point out the way it makes sudden and perfect sense of everything that happens in the film. “The time has come, young man, for you to learn about the Plot.” “Darth Vader is a servant of the dark side of the Plot.” When Ben Kenobi gets written out, he becomes one with the Plot and can speak inside the hero’s head. When a whole planet of good guys gets blown up, Ben senses “a great disturbance in the Plot.”

Was that deep or what? Unfortunately, it doesn’t help me much. Although I approve of pulps and plot devices, I have a tendency (in original fiction) to implant my plot devices in the characters’ brains or genomes. If you don’t look too closely, it passes for characterization.

You Are Jemima
Queen of the Filk, Our Lady of the AU, and accidental founder of Zendom, you tend to burn your way through the dry wood of fandom, leaving more than one bridge in flames behind you. You are content with your muse, your blog and nice pairing or two to marry off.
Take the Which Zendom Mod are You? Quiz

It’s good to know I’m still me, though I am sliding slowly into Loriness. I don’t know why the other mods decided to resurrect the Mod Quiz (it may have something to do with the approching zendom anniversary issue), but I’m sure it was All Seema’s Fault.