Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Take the Purrsonality Quiz!

I was home sick one day this week, and despite being high on antihistamines,
I got more writing done than I usually do healthy. I found it relaxing to have the
whole day ahead of me to write whatever the muse chose to write. For some
reason that doesn’t work with Sundays.

It’s hard for me to get the whole picture of a story in my head with just a few
spare hours after a long day of startup-meltdown craziness. The muse wants her
mental lebensraum. If only fanfic paid the rent, she could have it.
I wonder if so many college students drop off the face of fandom when they
graduate because of the sudden lack of muse-time.

I’ve been meaning to filk this one for a long, long time. It was like shooting
fish in a barrel, really: I’ve Grown
Accustomed to the Phage. If you don’t recall the original tune, I keep a page
of original lyrics for my filks.

Pardon me while I go post it to ASC.

Thanks to Sara, all the sad, lonely plot bunnies of the world have a place to
hang out and multiply. Hop on over to
The Breeding
Ground and watch the fic fly!

Jade’s drabble Sands of Decision
and Picnic Prize-winning story A Moment of
Clarity are up.

Also, for your reading pleasure, a preliminary filk from my forthcoming filk
musical, The Sound of Borgness:

Filk:      Drone Seven
Original:  (How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Maria
Codes:     Borg Queen, drones, pre-Scorpion
Date:      August 26, 2002

   Two of Nine:
She rushes round
With such a sound -
She never takes the stair.

   Three of Nine:
She leaks when she assimilates
And all the new drones stare.

   Two of Nine:
And underneath her armor
She has mammaries to spare!

   Three of Nine:
Drone Seven doesn't fit in the Collective.

   Two of Nine:
She's early for her duties,

   Four of Nine:
But she does them like a drone.

   Two of Nine:
She's leaves us still regenerating
And does our work alone.

   Borg Queen:
It's time to put Our foot down -
All the evidence has shown

   Two and Three of Nine:
Drone Seven doesn't fit in the Collective.

   Four of Nine:
We could have ended like the other five;
But Seven saved our lives!

   Three of Nine:
How do you solve a problem like drone Seven?

   Borg Queen:
How do you reassimilate a drone?

   Four of Nine:
How do you find a role that fits drone Seven?

   Two of Nine:
A manifold scrubber!

   Three of Nine:
A sonambulist!

   Four of Nine:
A Queen!

   Borg Queen:
Many a thing she feels she ought to tell you,
Many a thing she tries to organize...

   Four of Nine:
But how can you make her stay
And do it proper Borg way?

   Borg Queen:
How do you cut her ego down to size?

   Four of Nine:
Oh, how do you solve a problem like drone Seven?

   Borg Queen:
What can you tell a drone who thinks she's wise?

   Four of Nine:
When I'm with her I'm unused
Out of contact and bemused,
Yet she makes me proud to think that I am Borg.

   Three of Nine:
Unpredictable as humans,
Independent like her parents.

   Four of Nine:
She's a good drone,

   Two of Nine:
She's a misfit.

   Four of Nine:
She is Borg.

   Three of Nine:
She'd out-pester any pest,
Drive a Horta from her nest,

   Two of Nine:
She could throw an old Hirogen
Off the trail.

   Four of Nine:
She's efficient,
She's precise,

   Three of Nine:
She's a nuisance.

   Four of Nine:
She's all right.

   Two of Nine:
She's a rebel!

   Four of Nine:
She's perfection!

   Borg Queen:
She's a girl.

   All:
How do you solve a problem like drone Seven?
How do you reassimilate a drone?
How do you find a role that fits drone Seven?
A manifold scrubber!
A sonambulist!
A Queen!

Many a thing she feels she ought to tell you,
Many a thing she tries to organize...
But how can you make her stay
And do it proper Borg way?
How do you cut her ego down to size?

Oh, how do you solve a problem like drone Seven?
What can you tell a drone who thinks she's wise?

I’m way behind on ASC, as usual, so I just read a set of three-week-old posts about writing fanfic series. Among them was a link to Phoenix Virtual Television. I’ve noticed how virtual series tend to attract non-fanfic readership, and the FAQ for PVT brought that point home when they said that virtual series allow character development, while other fanfic has to return the characters in their original state at the end of the story.

Now there’s a sure sign of someone who hasn’t actually read any fanfic. Voyager has been off the air for a while, but I’m pretty sure that Janeway was never a prostitute, Chakotay a deadbeat dad, Paris a starship captain, Torres a housewife, Tuvok a double agent, Neelix a naked Lothario, Seven a brain-sucking not-so-ex-Borg, Kim lucky in love, or the EMH off-screen. That’s the stuff of fanfiction, along with weddings and babies and angst and character death.

The trouble with writing a fanfic series, I hear, is keeping track of your own canon. I haven’t written any myself (unless the unpublished fragments of the Seven Saga count) and I don’t read any except Lori’s Captain and Counselor. Not that I have anything against series; the show itself is already a series, and that’s enough continuity for me.

By ’series’ I mean a series of freestanding works. A show like Babylon 5 where you find yourself asking, “Who’s that?” and “What the heck is going on?” in every other scene, and the answer, if anyone can provide one, is longer than the commercial break, is not a series but a serial. Soap operas are the classic example of serials, though most serials are closed-ended - serialized novels in magazines, or one-season soap operas in South America. The only thing worse than an endless serial is a pseudo-serial like the X-Files that pretends to have an arc but really just tosses out disconnected bits of rubbish about pox, bees, clones and black oil. But I digress.

Is a series fundamentally more enjoyable than a single “original” work? That’s the question I asked myself when I reached Memory in my rereading of LMB. I doubt I would have sympathized so much with Miles if I hadn’t expected better of him. Does that mean I’m going to go forth and write a million words about Seven of Nine? Probably not.

But I am tempted.

There are more spoilers in this entry than usual. Don’t make me say I told you so.

I’ve reached Mirror Dance in my Lois McMaster Bujold rereading project, and it’s certainly grown on me. With apologies to Liz, though, I still can’t add it to my favorites. I rank it above the pure space operatics, but below the moving themes of Shards of Honor, Memory and
Komarr.

Christine once said “psychology robs us of our complexity.” (John Irving?) The on-and-off psychoanalysis of Mark robbed him of his complexity for me. He starts out intriguingly clueless and inchoate, but then he overhears his parents talking about him, has some sort of Road to Damascus event right there on the library floor, and loses me completely.

I’m not knocking the presence of psychobabble itself - Cordelia’s analysis of Mark was wonderful, and the little bits about Gregor both taking after Cordelia and watching the watcher were lovely, too. Only Mark’s psychological insight into himself threw me, because to me self-knowledge is at the other end
of the mental health spectrum from psychological instability. This contradiction comes to a head when Mark tries to warn Kareen about his mental problems, and settles for letting Cordelia warn her. At that point, I didn’t see what was left to warn her about. (Apparently Cordelia didn’t either.)

I know Liz isn’t buying this, so let’s compare Mark to Miles. For at least the previous two books, Miles’ identity problems (Lt. Miles vs. Lord Miles vs. Admiral Miles, with a side of Amnesiac Miles) have been a significant theme, but never has anyone reduced Miles to a syndrome or a defense mechanism. Yes, Cordelia blamed it on Barrayar, but I didn’t buy that. For one thing, that’s LMB talking about how she
meant to write about the pain of a mutant in a military anti-mutant society, while the real pain has come mainly from his grandfather and his own screw-ups. More importantly, Miles has never looked for a therapeutic purpose behind “the little Admiral.” When he thinks about it at all, Miles is just as ignorant as the reader about the psychological underpinnings of his multiple personality - and just as disinterested.

That Mark can explain Mark to himself makes him fundamentally less complex than Miles. Perhaps in real life psychology does not rob us of our individuality, but in literature explaining a character too well amounts to explaining the character away. Yes, there are more pieces of Mark than of Miles at the end of the novel, but Mark’s pieces are all labelled and pinned to a board, while Miles’ pieces run free (and run him into serious trouble in Memory, as foreshadowed by Cordelia when she says she’ll only
start worrying about Miles when the little Admiral is taken away).

For all the fascinating parallels between Mark and Miles, Mark is not a mirror image of his big brother. Mark is, if you’ll pardon the math, a projection of 3-space Miles onto a rather dark plane. It does take the whole novel to get him properly pinned down, but I don’t see room for a Mark sequel beyond his comic subplot in A Civil Campaign.

Speaking of comic subplots, I think I’m in love with Ivan Vorpatril.

Writing fanfic is like speaking a language. The vocabulary of that language
depends on the style of fanfic - for some, the language is the events of canon as
broadcast. For others, the language is the infectious ideas of fanon. Canon people
may denigrate a fanon story in which the characters are stunningly out of
character. Fanon people more often express a sentiment of boredom when reading
canon stories in which none of their own familiar chords are struck.

To make a random analogy, canon fanfic is like historical fiction, where the
challenge is to fit a story to the historical record. (An AU would be like alternate
history.) Fanon fanfic is more like
romance novels, in which the overall plot and emotions are rather standardized,
and the challenge is to do that popular turbolift theme in your own personal way.

Neither canon nor fanon is much like the mystery novel; that much
concentrated, mandatory plotting would be hard to reconcile with the
language of either fanon
or canon. Science fiction and fantasy depend upon writing a new language
(for the new world) and then convincing the reader that she speaks it. That’s
the opposite of fanfic, even for sci-fi shows.

I meant to blog about communication in fandom more generally, so
let me see if I can connect the dots. The language of fanfic is similar
to the language of general fannishness - a canon writer knows the nits as
well as any nitpicker would. A fanon writer knows the classic episodes for
her preferred fanon pairing, even if only second-hand. A complaint about the
show itself leads to a fanfix.

There is no question of civility in fanfic itself - you can snark to your heart’s
content, and as long as you phrase it as a story, there is no arguing with you
directly. Someone might write her own counter-story, but such exchanges
are rarely violent. There’s quite a lag in writing stories, and there’s a bigger
one in reading them - if you read them at all. What J/C fan would read our
C/7 fic to find out what we’re saying about J/C? There’s a dialogue going on
there, but it’s between the writer and the fanon, not the writer and the reader.

There’s no question of civility when talking about the show, either, because
such discussions are always a bloody (and I mean that literally, not Britishly)
religious war. Kill them all and let Roddenberry sort them out.
Just walk into
#jetc and start talking about C/7 and you’ll see what I mean. Or read the
TrekBBS on any topic. These are topics on which we agree to disagree
violently, repeatedly and irreconcilably.

Sometimes, we’re not writing fanfic and we’re not talking about the show.
Those are the meta and the diva times - talking about fandom itself, or
talking about our lovely selves. Meta and diva cause the most controversy
(as opposed to formalized name-calling).
Is someone else’s ideas about, say, the Muse a legitimate meta discussion or
a claim to divine standing?
Is an email about your important diva doings, when crossposted to a generous
smattering of lists, just helpful information or annoying mass-marketing? Is
meta interesting at all? Is snark cruel? Does merely having opinions turn you
into a diva?

At the meta-diva level, we’ve lost our common tongue of Trek or Vamp
or whatever it might be, and we’re thrown back on our native languages.
Where I come from, sarcasm is never a faux pas, but
self-promotion always is. If someone is clearly stupider than you are, you don’t
point that out. You never, ever, ever condescend. It’s fine to go slumming but
you can’t rub his face in it, and
you’re not going to get any sympathy from your friends after the breakup.

But I digress. The point is that there’s a grammar. Some of the rules
are national, some local, some class-based, some individual. It’s not a matter
of print coming across differently than voice would - the sentences themselves
mean different things in different languages.

The Basic English of fandom is always to say thank you for feedback and
never to voice a negative opinion. It’s a starveling tongue, but I doubt there’s
a bigger intersection between the various languages out there. As I get older,
I find that not much can be conveyed in Basic Fannish, and not much of what
can interests me. I’d rather talk to someone who speaks my language than
dance around someone who doesn’t.

Disclaimer for speakers of foreign languages: Note that
I never said canon was better than fanon, or that New Englanders were better
than midwesterners. Nothing I said means that canon is better than fanon or
that I am better than you, not even if you would
have meant exactly that if you had written the above.