Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Why don’t people understand that it is just as hard work to be a minor writer as a major one? - Robert Warshow

You go to bed late, so you get up late, you eat breakfast late, and you get to work late. It’s already gorgeous out at ten when you get there, so by two, you decide an outdoor lunch is in order. You take a stroll around the block, noticing that it’s rather too warm to count as gorgeous, and you end up where the secretary predicted you would - on the green in front of the local library.

By now you want out of the sun, but the green is mysteriously bereft of shade. There are trees, yes, but they don’t seem to be casting any shadows. You wander a bit, investigating the situation (it’s a big green, and a big library - freshly renovated, the secretary said), until you find a tree of your own. The shade of its branches is better than nothing.

Yes, the shade of its bare branches - the trees on the green are in bud, and the fancy ones in flower, but it’s eighty-five degrees out in the bright sunshine and there are no leaves.

You think of the heat, still on in your apartment, because the landlord is legally obliged to provide it for another month yet. It was never really winter and now it’s suddenly high summer. It hardly snowed and now it’s not raining. You can’t remember the last time it rained. You think of the reservoir on the other side of the state, of the water that flows downhill a hundred miles to your faucet. When you get back from lunch, the secretary says we’ve ruined the earth.

My name is Jemima, and I am an INTP

A few words from intp.org to explain the mystery of me:

Not that any of that excuses my behavior - rational argument never needs to be excused. It’s just another fine bit of purloined content for this long-inactive blog.

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…

Yes, folks, it’s tax day in Massachusetts. Yesterday was a state holiday - Patriot’s Day, on which we commemorate Paul Revere’s 26-mile run from Hopkinton to Copley Square, at the end of which he shouted “The British are coming!” and fell dead on the steps of the Public Library. Or something like that.

In any event, the post offices and regional IRS offices were closed, so the deadline to file was postponed until today. I wasted my holiday filling out US C-EZ schedules and calculating how much I’d paid in rent this year - though it was, of course, far more than the maximum Mass. state deduction for rent. That’s the price of living it up in the capital. There was one exciting moment where I read the wrong line from the 1040 into a worksheet, and thought I’d gotten an extra $300 refund. No such luck.

I spent the rest of the holiday finishing Buffy Anne, Supergirl, my latest, not particularly successful, Buffy filk, and arguing with zenites about smut. I’m afraid to go back to my inbox, actually - I don’t really understand why people who are so sure I’m wrong are so upset by the evidently wrong things I said. Go figure…

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: