Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

A
brief
history of the blog war

A figure appeared on the sand in ample judicial robes. “Why are we at the
beach?” she asked. “It’s not beach weather in any of our hemispheres.”

“Christine!” There was joy in the Zen Resort, mixed with a subconscious
fear that she had come seeking betas for her legalfic.

“We appear to have misplaced the pool,” Lori said, taking the opportunity to
toss Virgil for Dummies into the ocean.

Jemima contemplated the now soggy tome as it swirled away. “I don’t
understand why we can’t decide how to spell Virgil. My Latin is a bit rusty, but
as I recall they used exactly the same alphabet we do.”

“Which alphabet is that?” Sean asked Lori.

“The Latin alphabet,” she informed her poolboy in an aside.

“I mean,” Jemima continued, “didn’t the fellow ever sign his name?”

“He does predate sig files,” Christine observed.

Liz donned her black toga to explain the situation. “The fellow
spelled his name Vergilius. The proper nick is therefore
Vergil. There’s no known explanation for
the centuries-long tradition of calling him Virgil.” She
paused a beat. “Except, of course, the usual one - nobody can spell a bloody
thing in English.”

“Virgil looks nicer,” said the Nice One.

“The Law is on the side of Vergil.” Christine scribbled some
notes. The others desperately hoped it wasn’t a new legalfic.

“Vergil gets my vote.” Lori picked a margarita off the tray
Sean was carrying around and sipped it with an air of finality.

Jemima’s eyes lit up. “Virgil,” she said. “Vergil, Virgil,
Vergil. Virgil. Do you know what this means?”

“What?” Sean asked. Lori slapped him for encouraging Jemima.

“Blog war! The Vergillians against the Virgilantes! Blood, sweat, tears
and little blue corpses filling the trenches of France!” She practically hummed
with excitement. “Seema, are you with me? We must defend the
i!”

“The i - sure…” Seema looked doubtful. “Uh, weren’t you
about to tell us about badficcers, though?”

“The i,” Jemima repeated dreamily.

“The witness is evading the question.” Christine rapped her gavel on
a passing smurf’s head. “The topic is badfic.”

Jemima traced a circle in the sand with her toe. “Well, ladies, I do have
a confession to make.” Beach chairs appeared and the Mod Squad seated
themselves. Sean came around with more margaritas. “I…I’m a badficcer.”

Sean gasped. Lori smacked him again.

“I’ve always been a badficcer. I married off the characters.”

“There is that,” Lori agreed.

“I made babies - lots of babies,” Jemima added. “How old is Janeway
anyway? I had her popping them out at the drop of a hat.”

“I must have missed that fic,” Seema said.

“Those five fics,” Christine muttered.

“I was a J/C writer, for Kahless’ sake!”

“We all were once,” Liz said.

“Speak for yourselves,” Seema and Lori protested in unison.

Jemima hung her head in shame. “I may as well be wearing an apron
that says Kiss the badficcer.”

“While barefoot, pregnant and baking cookies,” Christine added.

“Hold on a minute.” Lori held up her empty glass, as if to block further
true confessions. “Jemima may have a weakness for weddings–”

“And said-bookisms,” interrupted Seema.

“And filk,” sang Liz.

“And Chakotay,” spat Christine. A passing smurf drowned in the unexpected
saliva shower.

Lori held up her glass menacingly. “But there’s one thing that sets us all
apart from badficcers–”

“Angst?” Liz asked.

“Slash,” said Christine.

“Plot,” Seema suggested.

“Virgil,” Jemima said.

Lori shook her head. “Spelling,” she declared.

I bet Veronica the real Buffy The Musical CD that Spike is human. How
could anyone be so flesh-toned and curly-haired and not be human? I know the
spoilers are on Veronica’s side, but I prefer to hope for the best.

My filk of The Sound of Music is not progressing, and I was disheartened when
I stumbled across
this
legendary filk of Do-Re-Mi. How could I ever compete with a classic like Do Re Mi
Beer?

Due to technical difficulties beyond my control (antique phone lines), I
was unable to blog yesterday. I did collect some cool and geeky links, though.

If you don’t know already, you should be using
Mozilla, the coolest browser on earth,
open-source and
popup-proof.
(Popup-killing advice compliments of
blogzilla, the Mozilla blog.)

To brighten up your Mozilla, try my favorite mozilla skin,
Orbit,
available from DeskMod. For the
truly geeky, or just those who want an easy way to clean up the cache and
history files after a long day of not-working at work, try the
XULPlanet preferences
toolbar. Note the convenient popup-killing checkbox. (I’m not sure why
you’d ever want to allow popups, but the option is there. Or just
the cool reminder of the millions of popups you’ve slain just by using a
real browser.)

On the image processing side, I discovered to my dismay that
Spinwave is forcing you to register before using their on-line image crunchers
to shrink your web images. Fortunately, I found a new site for cutting those
pesky jpegs down to size:
jpeg wizard. Gifs don’t
tend to need as much shrinking, anyway.

While on the prowl for jpegs to shrink, I found a goldmine of totally-free,
public domain images paid for by Your Tax Dollars:
freestockphotos.com. Skip
down past the quasi-religious links to the government photo repositories.

Check out
We Read Crap So You Don’t
Have To, a blog of fic rec announcements. I don’t know that a one-blogger
show can keep up with that long list of rec sites, but man is it trippy to look at.
Just wait a minute before you click anything.

I think I forgot to announce the
zendom update, again. Read
up on how the fans fan.

Here’s something for Seema.

Filk:  Season
Original: Memory, from Cats (lyrics by Trevor Nunn after T. S. Eliot)

Midnight, not a word from B'Elanna...
Has my muse lost her bat'leth?
I am writing alone.
In the weblog the broken fics collect in a heap
And I cannot find my drone.

Zenning, all alone with my laptop;
All those files from the old days -
I was popular then.
I remember when first I learned what fanfiction was.
Let the bat'leth strike again.

Every blogger just repeats
More metafic kvetching.
Someone utters and the next one sputters
Another meme is catching.

Jossed out, I must fill up my hard drive,
I must think of the new show
And I mustn't slow down.
By September my fic will be passé as McCoy,
When the vamps come back to town.

Cut off bits of angsty fics,
The same old couples parting.
My traffic drops, another summer over,
Another season starting.

Hit me one last time then forget me,
Let me cherish the memory
Of the contests I won -
Of the bat'leth that taught me just what fanfiction was.
Look, the season has begun.

September 30th and October 1st seem to be very popular deadlines. I have
one nonfiction article due on each day, which makes it hard for me to think about
the fiction deadlines coming up on the same days.

October first is the receipt deadline for
Strange
New Worlds VI, the annual Trek amateur mediafic contest. Note that I
don’t say fanfic contest. Since the majority of fanfic themes are
either banned outright or heavily frowned upon, it can hardly
be called a fanfic contest.
Almost all the don’t mess with the characters rules of the
Paramount pay-per-fic media franchise are in effect at SNW. (For more about
SNW as pay-per-fic, see my review of
SNW IV.)

I don’t have enough time to write fanfic, never mind pay-per-fic, and the
only think I have approaching a complete, unpublished story is a chapter of
the ever-to-appear Seven Saga which just wouldn’t gel into a real fic. Should
I give it an emergency plot transfusion, just to sell it into slavery to Paramount?
Nah.

The other fiction contest coming up is much better about leaving story
rights in the hands of the writer.
The quarterly and annual postmark deadline for
Writers of the Future,
the biggest speculative-fiction contest I know of, is
September 30th. Winners get dough along with a week-long writing workshop.
On the downside, it’s run by the L. Ron Hubbard people and, no surprise, doesn’t
allow fanfic. I’ve been reading Writers of the Future XVI, and
finding the fiction a little too speculative for my tastes. I’m hoping for a nice,
juicy space opera before I hit the back cover.

Another upside of WotF is the writing essays scattered throughout the
contest anthology. The best one so far was about…writing. A good story,
Algis Budrys says, should have a beginning, a middle and an end. In the
beginning, you introduce the character, the context and the problem. In
the middle the character attempts to solve the problem and fails - three
attempts, three failures. That’s the rule of three - two is too little, four too much.
Next comes victory, still
in the middle. The end is devoted to “validation”, some sort of external
evidence that the story is really over. The example he gives is “Who was that
masked man?” The character, by the way, doesn’t change - he is only revealed
by the action, not transformed.

Yes, it’s simple, yes, it’s formulaic, and yes, it’s a little odd, but I thought if
I went back to my UFO folder and applied these rules, I might actually come
out with at least one finished story. If I only had more free time…

How did it get this late at night? It must have been the bad Pierce Brosnan
volcano movie…

So people are going on about fanfiction.net. Thanks to Seema for this
link
to a classic LiveJournal comment-in on the issue.

I have only a couple of stories up at ffn, as an experiment. I had an
especially bad experience with the first one, in which ffn went down for a month
about an hour after I posted it. Fanfiction.net has always seemed like the AOL
of the fandom world - so easy to use that it channels a newbies into situations
they’re not ready
for. AOL users are famous for breaches of netiquette; ffn users for literary and
grammatical offenses. Yes, I know competent, professional people who use
AOL. I know good writers who use ffn. That doesn’t alter the fact that ffn lowers
the bar in a realm in which the bars are already too low. As we say in
mathematics, it fills a much needed gap in the literature.

It’s too late at night to explain how flooding the market with bad fanfic
drives out the good, and even the notion of good. Go reread the section of the
Hitchhiker’s Trilogy about bad shoes destroying the economy of an entire planet.
No, the point that interests me in the recent ffn debacle is the idea some people
have gotten into their heads that giving someone money makes the recipient a
business.

Far from it. Consider another link from Seema:
Save Karyn. Is Karyn a business?
Does everyone recall the classic rec.humor.funny joke about
amazon.org?
There are certain requirements to being a business. It isn’t
enough to go around destroying the book distribution infrastructure by selling
books at a loss in hopes that
someday, when there are no independent booksellers left standing, your
monopoly will finally
net you a profit. At least, that shouldn’t be enough to make you a
business. (Refer back to the Hitchhiker’s section on bad shoes.)

Likewise, giving away web services, and upgrading them for people who
make monetary contributions, is not a business. I’m well acquainted with this
popular non-business through my web host,
freeshell, a.k.a. SDF. Freeshell
is run by a guy named Stephen Jones, out of his own pocket, with some help
from contributions from members like me. It’s free to all, but you get perks
in exchange for donations. After a year of the free membership, I gave $36
as a one-time contribution and got ftp and a few hundred megabytes extra
space. In return, I have nothing but Stephen’s word for it that he’ll go on
hosting the service and and letting me
eat
bandwidth. I average 11MB a day, and the limit for my level of
membership is 50MB.
(I don’t know where it all goes - it’s not people reading my fic, that’s for sure.)
If SDF ran out of funds to pay for the uplink, I would have to move elsewhere.
If Stephen decided fanfiction was a legal liability, I’d have to move elsewhere.
That’s just the way of the free world.

SDF has been giving unix junkies like me a free shell to play in since 1987,
so I’m not worried about it going away. I think it’s a great service, and if I
weren’t so lazy I’d give Stephen even more money. But I’m sure there are
freeshell users who feel that SDF’s anti-hacking regulations violate the true
freedom of the shell. Don’t Windows machines deserve to be hacked? How can
any self-respecting unix user stand in the way of the Darwinian forces of
hacking? Wouldn’t that be communism or something?

When you’re running a community service, you have to bow to certain
community standards. It’s the people with the money who can afford to put up
porn or send out spam, and pay the legal consequences out of their ample
profits. I’ve checked out a lot of free web hosts, between my mirrors
and Trek sites I’ve set up, and it’s the rare TOS that allows adult content. Why
should they? Why should anyone go up against community or
legal standards, however benighted those standards might be, for
free, for a bunch of strangers? Strangers, by the way, who turn
on you and call you a communist when the chips are down?

I can’t think of a reason, myself.

Having been way too busy lately, between my current job and a sudden
reappearance of work from three years ago that’s been consuming my free time,
I have a big backlog of blog ideas, plus recent disturbing thoughts from Lori
and Seema. If you squint while you read this, you may even spot a
coherent theme.

From the November 2002 Analog, Niven’s First Law for Writers:
Writers who write for other writers should write letters.

The first thing I thought of when I saw that was, of course,
the fanfic potlatch, but maybe
LiveJournal is a better example. I’ve never cared for LiveJournal, not even
when I thought it was just another diaryland; I prefer blogs.

A blog is not a journal or a diary. It is not evidence of membership
in a particular clique. It is not a longwinded, scattered metafic forum. A blog is
just a weblog - links and thoughts of interest at least to the writer, possibly to
passing readers. A blog is asynchronous.

Blogging shouldn’t be work. Fandom is too much work already - why take
on yet another job? Blogging shouldn’t be a misplaced mailing list, forum, or
newsgroup, if only because clicking around the net after the next comment is
far more inconvenient than reading mail or news, and slightly more
inconvenient than a forum or bulletin board.

I’ve always been against work in fandom, all the little and big ways we
make this all so much harder than it should be. I’ve railed against
fic taxes from the
beginning, and I bring my tax evasion with me when I blog. I don’t do the
blog rounds. I read a few blogs that I find interesting (see right column
or the main page if you’re coming from the
archives), and if those known interesting people mention something intriguing,
I’ll follow the link. Otherwise, I just surf around when I have the time.

The latest addition to my blog list is Alara Rogers; I added her not because
I know her, or am fishing for a blog potlatch return link, but because on the
rare occasions I get sucked into reading a LiveJournal-based metafic thread,
I seem to end up on her site, like her points, and think, “oh, yeah, Alara
Rogers has a blog.” It’s not a social thing. If I want a social thing, I can open
my inbox, which my list full of chatty C/7 fans seems determined to keep
stuffed.

So it’s impossible for me to get tired of blogging. It’s just me thinking
aloud here, and how could I get tired of thinking? Blogging is asynchronous, so
I can blog as little or as much as I want. I do it nearly daily because I enjoy
certain kinds of writing. One kind is writing fic, but the other kind is writing
letters. Email isn’t really like pen-and-paper letter-writing - it’s not
asynchronous enough. Emails are too full of quoted material and background
context to stand on their
own. They’re too instantaneous to require the style of writing that re as it
goes, that makes its own freestanding argument. Emails have no ink.

Blogger was kind enough to give me back the pen-and-paper approach
to writing, but with a larger potential audience. So I blog like I used to write
letters in the days before most people had email - to amuse, at a distance,
in a coherent and freestanding way.

The more communal and comment-centric LiveJournal gets, the further it
drifts from asynchronous writing and into dialogue. Dialogue, in fandom, turns
to meta, or at least show-chat. Dialogue means if no one comments,
no one cares.
Letter-writing, on the other hand, is prone to long silences which do not
reflect badly on the writer. You post a blog entry, and you get a few
other people’s blog entries that day, asynchronously, on random topics they
thought might interest you. Comments are beside the point in letter-blogging.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Fandom can only chew you up and spit
you out if you let it. If you’re careful not to pay unnecessary, self-defeating,
time-stealing and fic-quenching taxes, you may survive to write again. If you
do, write me a letter and tell me about it.

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. … [I]t’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. –Ernest Hemingway

The River gives the book its form. But for the River, the book might be only a sequence of adventures with a happy ending. A river, a very big and powerful river, is the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination. –T. S. Elliot

The truly profound meanings of the novel are generated by the impingement of the actual world of slavery, feuds, lynching, murder, and a spurious Christianity upon the ideal of the raft. –Leo Marx

(Quotes about Huckleberry Finn courtesy of English 311 at Gonzaga University.)

The Rift by Walter Jon Williams (writing as Walter J. Williams for reasons one can only wonder at), is the Huckleberry Finn of disaster novels. It begins by flashing back a thousand years to an earthquake that ravaged Mississippi Indian society. Each scene is headed with an extract of original documents from the 1811/1812 New Madrid earthquake, so you know exactly what’s going to happen by the time the novel is over. I didn’t pick up on a real pattern or progress to the captions, but they were interesting in and of themselves, for their language as well as the sharp cultural contrasts. For instance, in 1811 when people felt the earth move, they tended to assume they were having a fit or hallucinating until someone else confirmed that it was really happening. I wondered why they were so slow
to trust their own senses.

Disaster novels follow a certain format. All the random characters must be introduced in their pre-disaster settings before fate, S-waves and the River toss them together. There’s the displaced Californian teenager, the laid-off black defense worker, the ambitious stockbroker, the fire-and-brimstone preacher, the Klan sheriff on his way up in the world, the Army Corps of Engineers general in charge of keeping the Lower Mississippi between its banks, the man refueling his nuclear power plant (why is there always a nuclear power plant?), and the President of the United States, party affiliation unspecified. Those are just the main characters; the supporting characters, such as the Klansman’s wife, the defense worker’s ex-wife, the teenager’s divorced parents, the preacher’s wife with the odd craft project, the general’s banjo-playing husband, and many more, are also wonderfully drawn.

The inscriptions fueled my eagerness for earthshaking mayhem and destruction - if I didn’t want disaster, I wouldn’t have picked up a novel that promised to ravage everything near the Mississippi River from St. Louis to the Gulf of Mexico - but the characters themselves were so well-done that I began to get into them for their own sakes, and not just to keep track later once they were stumbling into each other through the rubble. Of course, that was when disaster struck.

The rubble, in this case, is floating down the Mississippi. The teenager survives the initial shock by luck and takes to the floodwaters in his neighbor’s fishing boat. He rescues the black man from a tree, beginning the main, Huckleberry Finnesqe plot of the novel. The preacher and the Klan Kleagle start out as sympathetic, if not particularly endearing, characters, and do a slow slide into evil that is far scarier than the earthquake itself (and it’s the worst of all possible earthquakes). The lady general and her husband are the most entertaining of all the characters, but my favorite was the President, who does his own slow slide into an indifference he insists makes no difference.

I picked this novel up intentionally to compare to Lucifer’s Hammer - one endangered nuclear power plant against another, no holds barred - but there’s no comparison. The Rift beats it on all scores besides death count, and verges on being a work of literature, besides. Someday people are going to wake up and realize that Walter Jon Williams can write circles around everyone else in SF. That he has to support himself by writing Star Wars novels is nothing short of… disastrous.