Texty

Doing my part to help Andrew's lovely film get a shortlist spot in the Virgin Media Shorts competition. Little Larry - Virgin Media Shorts

If you've not yet seen this, do--it's well worth the couple of minutes. :) If you like, please hit the share buttons below the vid. There are 12 shortlist films chosen by the judges, plus a 13th spot that goes to the one that gets the most shares between yesterday and the 19th.

Andrew's a fantastic filmmaker, and he really deserves to get as much attention as possible for this work.

Pasting this over from Tumblr. Saw a post from someone asking fic writers some questions for a project she's doing, and this was my answer:

***

I’ve written in just two fandoms—LOTR and Primeval—but I’ve written quite a lot in both. In Primeval alone I’m probably at about 200k words, including a 120k-word novel centering on my OT3 (Abby/Becker/Connor.) I tend to prefer slash and mmf triads, but I’ve written plenty of femmeslash, het, gen and even RPF.

For me, fic is primarily about exploring relationships (primarily sexual, but sometimes other stuff) and situations that go beyond what a given canon will or can portray. It’s also very good practice for my legit writing, as it helps me work out plotting issues, correct bad habits, explore character and scene dynamics, and other technical writing stuff.

I find I’m most attracted to canons that have a lot of subtext going on, or a pairing or subplot that’s hinted at, but never fully explored. I know a lot of writers don’t really care about canon all that much and just gleefully go off and write whatever they will—AUs, etc.—but for me, finding a way to integrate my side stories and “after hours” scenes into a canon framework is a fun challenge, and makes the writing more satisfying. I also prefer to read stories like this; wildly AU or out-of-character fic doesn’t interest me. I’m there for the canon I love, not someone else’s virtually original fic. I much prefer to read professionally written original fiction, if I’m going there.

I rarely write fanfic OCs except as needed for certain plots or scenes. They’re red shirts or background characters, at best. Again, this is because I’m there for the canon. I write plenty of original fiction as well as fanfic, so if I have original characters I want to develop, I do that separately. And oh, do I! I wouldn’t say there’s a process I use to create them. They just come to me, sparked by ideas from other things, or sometimes even entirely spontaneously.

I definitely do fall in love with my characters, both the canon ones and the ones I write for my original stuff. Though I try to ensure my canon characters are as true to the originals as possible, there are, of course, things that are slightly different. More than that, however, it’s a deeper exploration of the lives and emotional states of those characters, and getting to know them more intimately like that does, definitely, create an emotional attachment for me.

It also happens that way for my original characters, and to an even stronger degree. I’d say that most writers of original fiction would agree that, in some ways, they’re kind of making their own best friends. In order to really understand a character’s motivation and write them authentically, you have to get intimate with them. They have to live inside your head quite a lot—as much as real loved ones would. And that naturally creates an emotional bond, even if the entire person only exists inside the mind.

I think people without a lot of imagination wouldn’t understand how this works. I’ve known people who can’t easily escape into fictional worlds at all, much less on an emotional level. They can’t relate to or care about anyone they don’t know in a physical, real-world context. I can’t imagine a life like that. Of course, I adore my meatspace friends and loved ones, but I also adore the ones I know only online, or the ones I know from fiction, or who exist only inside my head. Physical selves are important, of course, but the core of who a person is is intangible. Connecting on that intangible level, for those of us who can do it, is often just as rewarding as connecting in meatspace. Sometimes even more so.

Naturally, when I should be in bed, I'm ruminating about stereotyping, marginalization, tokening, stock characters, archetypes, blah blah.

All because I've found it annoying that metacultural representations of geeks tend to go with shorthand based on Star Wars, Star Trek, vampires, zombies, superheroes and, if they're trying to aim in a slightly more hipster direction, Whedon (for UKers: Add Who.) And also because I'm feeling rather marginalized these days because I'm not really into any of those things, and therefore I'm apparently not really a geek, depending on whom one asks.

( Big fandoms are big. They are not the only ones. Nor is everyone in them the same. )

We geeks are no longer few and dispersed. We can afford to ignore or even complain about things aimed at us that don't ring true. And we should. We are a force to be reckoned with, after all. Making us angry would be highly illogical, because we are subtle and quick to anger and use our braaains. Shiny? Then don't panic, allons-y and let's avada kedavra these lazy fraks.

Thanks to being nearly done with A Feast for Crows and watching Cersei Lannister do her worst, I think I've just figured out one of the reasons I tend to have issues communicating/getting along with many other women: I'm not passive-aggressive enough.

Women are often taught that being direct equals being aggressive and confrontational (and unattractively masculine), so instead of bringing up a concern with the person causing it, they go about trying to solve it via stealth and subterfuge. And when they do get into direct conflicts, they default to personal attacks and derailing, instead of dealing with the issue head-on.

Me? I generally don't do that. Occasionally, my directness borders on overly blunt and tactless, but I simply don't believe in bullshitting or talking around something/someone. It's a waste of time, and causes far more problems than it solves. But because people don't expect that from a woman, it ends up seeming far more harsh and confrontational than it would coming from a man. Add in the other issues that brings up, with violating gender roles, etc., and it's not surprising that a lot of women would find me infuriating. I don't play by the rules of engagement they're familiar with, and it throws them off their game.

There's a lot of (legitimate) concern about how men are taught to solve conflicts with violence. This is clearly a bad thing, and should stop. However, there is one advantage to that kind of problem-solving: It's direct, it's quick, and there's never any question about who's on which side. A single punch in the mouth will heal pretty fast. Six months of rumor spreading and other catty social aggression takes far, far longer. If a man doesn't like you or has a problem with you, he tells you. If a woman doesn't like you, you may never know until she's taken you down behind the scenes. She may even be downright friendly with you to your face while she's savaging you socially in other ways. A man will kill you. A woman will kill everything you love. And that? Is horrid.

Fortunately, I'm lucky enough to have found quite a few women friends who don't play that game. I've even had disagreements with some, and yet we're still friends, because we got it out in the open well before it could fester and rot. Problem is that it's so hard to tell on the surface whether a given woman will be like that, or whether she's a backstabbing coward. Which makes me really wary of making new female friends. I have to spend enough time on the periphery of them to be sure that they're not like that before I feel comfortable trusting them.

In some cases, that caution has been misinterpreted as being cold or snobby or selfish. My lack of interest in pursuing instant sisterhood with any woman I meet bothers a lot of them. Then again, the ones who are bothered by it are probably the ones I'd rather not be around anyway. Because if a woman expects me to engage in the initial friendship dance the same way other women do, she's probably going to expect me to do everything else the traditional way, too. And the first conflict we have? When I say what's wrong in so many words? Will earn me the social death penalty from her.

So, yeah. This is probably why I tend to have a lot more male than female friends. Just not interested in the mean girls' art of war. Call me Brienne, I guess. ;)

Just finished a rewatch of the amazing In Her Skin, which is based on a true story of a murder in Australia. Watched it the first time since one of my Primeval actors plays the villainess in it, and it's easily one of my favorites, now.

Most of this comes down to the amazing work done in that role, and how familiar so much of her story feels to me. There are some scenes of her freakouts that honestly could have been me at various times of my life. I don't know what she was diagnosed with--I'm guessing bipolar, or some sort of personality disorder--but the mix of obsessiveness, self-loathing, rage, etc., is definitely something I can identify with.

So what made the difference? Why did this girl get so far gone that she ended up killing someone, and I'm now in relatively decent nick?

( People who cared and the government funding that paid them )

I am, and always will be someone who has a mental illness, but thanks to people who cared, I can manage it basically on my own now. As long as I have access to my meds, a partner who loves me unconditionally and the tools I need (hi, Livejournal!) to work through the bad days when they happen, I'm functional.

I just wish the same could be said for the millions of others out there who are falling through the cracks. Not all of us will turn to murder, of course, but there's enough suffering of other kinds out there that it's unconscionable that a first-world country like the US isn't properly equipped to manage us. Millions of lives are lost to suicide and indirect self-harm. Millions more are affected by people who aren't getting the help they need. When are we going to realize that this is a major public health crisis, and do something about it?

So, I wanted to write a followup about this post I did over here, but M just came home, and I'd rather go hang with him instead.

So, in place of my usual metacultural babble, just imagine that I've said something profound about how pop culture not only encourages asexuality or immature sexuality in girls and young women, but grossly underprepares them to deal with the hardcore sexuality it conversely instills in young men.

Or, in other words: There are legions of 16-year-old girls out there who really don't get that that 25-year-old idol they crush out on probably has three dozen favorite porn sites and is into stuff they've never even heard of.

(And, even sadder: When they do figure this out, said girls have a tendency to go way overboard in trying to adapt to this, and end up doing stuff they really don't want to do just to make these guys happy. Bleh. :( )

Deflowering Harry Potter dream, complete with wand jokes? Kinda awesome.

FTR, it was current-Radcliffe (aka quite legal) Harry, and I was only a bit older. Even my pervy subconscious isn't an icky creeper.

Oh, and Hogwarts was apparently a coastal resort hotel, and chopsticks can be used as wands. Only all I could remember was expelliarmus.

Hit the ground running as soon as we got back, and have barely had time to think, let alone properly sleep. It caught up with me Wednesday, and I ended up working from home--and doing rather awfully with it--due to sleep-deprived delirium. Conking out soon and plan to veg in the theater all day tomorrow with our massive DVR and Netflix backlog.

---

The vacay reports (and there will be one last one when I remember to pull the remaining pics) are up for your perusal (scroll back a few entries.) Long story short if you don't want the slog: It was great, I loved it, but I don't think I'll be moving there. Like home better. :)

---

Two more work weeks before I hit the end of my contract. There's a small chance of a few weeks' extension because one of my eds wants me around for Comic-Con coverage, but that probably won't happen. Technically, I have another four months before I have to take my mandatory break, and my agency might well find me something short for then, but honestly, I think I'd rather have the rest of the summer off. I need a chance to breathe and get my head back on correctly and do some of the big projects I've been putting off.

---

One of said big projects is the adoption thing, though that's... sort of up in the air right now. ( Details )

***

One thing we most likely will do in the meantime is get another kitten. It's been horribly empty being just a two-cat household since Fammy died, and poor, ancient Penny is getting pestered by Otter all the time because he's bored and lonely. But with me working, we didn't want to introduce a new furbaby without having someone around to mind it through the chaotic adjustment period. Free time for me, though, means kitten-sitting is possible, so we'll probably go shelter-crawling in the next few weeks. We considered a dog, but with the baby thing still a possibility, we didn't want to go that high-maintenance. So, kitten (or maybe even a 1-2 year old) it is.

***

Feeling slightly maudlin about the end of my show in a couple of weeks. Likely to be the last series of it, unless its primary backer gets good ratings when it airs this series in January. Seems unlikely at this point. And even if it did come back, most of the cast I love might not come with it. So just two more episodes, and then I get to cry a lot. I have a ton of other stuff I love, of course (have really gotten into Game of Thrones in particular), but this is the first thing since LOTR that I've loved enough to join a fandom for, and the fandom itself has been great, too. It'll still exist after the show's gone, of course, but it won't be quite the same, and that concept breaks my heart. :(

***

And on that depressing note, I'm done for the day. Hasta la pasta, and if you want more of me in the meantime, go stalk me on Twitter.

I just now realized that Mother's Day is the day before my surgery. I.e., the day before I say goodbye to ever bearing children. Theoretically, since my ovaries won't be affected, I could use a gestational carrier and still have bio kids, but since my stoopid eggs wouldn't get fertilized in the first place, and the fertility clinic basically refused to do egg extraction on me anyway, that's not an option. So any future kids I obtain are going to be someone else's. I've known this for a while, now, of course, but it's still kind of hard to swallow. It would help if my stupid culture wasn't so bloody obsessed with bio mothers, as if they're the only people in the world capable of being proper parents.

---

Speaking of the surgery, I had my pre-op consult for it yesterday, and they confirmed that they're knocking me entirely out. I'm a little worried about this (anesthesia is the reason the clinic refused to work on me, after all) but mostly, I'm just not looking forward to waking up. The last time I did general, I was horribly miserable when I came to: Thirsty, headachy, confused, scared, etc. Nastiness.

Also not looking forward to the drug I need to take the night before, as it's supposed to cause horrible cramps. Yaye.

---

Fortunately, I shall have glorious fandom goodness to distract me from all this, as there's a premiere event going on Sunday at which a fandom friend will be. There will be pics, I hope! Also still hoping there will be some folks at the event I'm going to at the end of the month, too. They haven't announced many guests at all, yet, so I'm still hopeful. Would kinda suck to spend 3 weeks traipsing around the show's home countries and not see at least someone from it. I'll be seeing some filming locations, of course, but that's not quite the same as real live humans. :)

---

My fannish creative muses came back. In hordes. In the last 10 days, I've written 9 fics (about 20k words) and put together a new vid (which I'm also retooling a bit for submission to a Dragon*Con fanvid contest.) Amazing what happens when new promo material gets me salivating. ;)

---

Good thing I've kept myself creatively busy, though. Got turned down by the first agent. Sigh... I kinda wondered if that might happen, though, as she's mostly doing modern fantasy/paranormal right now, and my thing is definitely a traditional fantasy setting, even if its plot and themes are less so. Will go hunting for other agents when we get back from our trip.

---

Semi-related, I was realizing yesterday that each decade of my life has some fairly clear definitions, in terms of a snapshot of who I was/what was important to me. 0-10 was school/reading/being a tomboy, 10-20 was school/politics/socializing/radio, 20-30 was school/performing/socializing/sorting out my love life, 30-40 was fandom/journalism/establishing a home/getting money sorted. What's 40-50 going to be? Not entirely sure, yet, but I think it may be novel-writing/parenting. And then probably add travel into that for my 50s. Not a bad life, I guess. At least I didn't spend most of it (so far) intoxicated or in jail.

---

Some of the above epiphany comes courtesy of the electronic attic-cleaning I've been doing the last couple of days. I've had several layers of poorly-filed crap sitting around in my docs folder for years. Most of it's from multiple backups, so there's a lot of duplicate and frankly useless crap in there I've been sorting through. And because I'm an idiot, I can't easily tell what most of these are about just by their titles, so I'm having to open them up and scan. And some of my old writings and such? Good grief.

I think for most of my 20s, I was dead convinced that if I didn't have a ton of lovers, it meant I was pathetic and useless. Granted, I'm still a randy little perv even now (hi, fanfic?) but I'm also not falling in lust with my friends all the time. Still a bit here and there, but not to the ridiculous degree it used to be. I think the difference is that while the libido is still there, the desperate need for approval isn't anymore. At least not that way. These days I'm pining away more for the approval of agents: writers' and adoption. Whether people consider me fuckable is of far less importance to me now than whether they consider me creatively skilled and good parenting material.

Which, I suppose, is one of the benefits of being near 40. Frankly, I don't think I'd ever want to go back to that state of being again. Feeling like my entire identity and self-worth was dependent on whether I was attractive enough was horrid. Still feel like that a lot now, but it's not as big a deal as it was then, at least. That monkey is still clinging to my back, but it's at least losing its grip, which is a damned nice feeling. I just feel sorry for the millions of other young women still beating themselves up every day because shallow idiots don't think they're decorative enough.

---

At any rate, this all kind of feels like I'm going away to the UK for some sort of major personality overhaul or something. Like I'm going to undergo some sort of rite of passage and come back a totally different person, and be ready for the next phase of my life. Which may be true. Three weeks of being 5,000 miles from home might give me a good and necessary brain scrubbing. We'll see whether I'm a Whole New Me come mid-June.

Thanks to ironymaiden's post here, I'm now aware that there are some kerfluffles in book circles about traditionalism in fantasy. My basic comment on the subjects at hand is over there, but it got me to thinking about some other, semi-related stuff.

As one might imagine, the meta concepts here are near and dear to me at the moment, given that I'm writing a fantasy novel with a female protagonist. The overall setting is more or less traditional--dwarves, elves, orcs, yadda yadda--but the story itself, while a typical hero's journey, has quite a few more modern elements to it.

( Storytelling )

One other thing I realized with that discussion, though: I really have no idea what else is out there in book land. I read just a few authors consistently, and really don't know much about other stuff, but for what M (whose Kindle is permanently attached to his hand) tells me. Obviously, this is a Bad Thing in terms of being a writer who hopes people want to read her stuff, but outside of that issue, I kind of take offense at the idea that I'm hopelessly gauche because books are inherently better, somehow, than other forms of storytelling.

( Media snobbery )

There are just as many ways to tell a story visually as with text. The shots the director chooses are as much a part of the storytelling as the words the characters speak, and knowing how to actually tell a story in pictures is, IMHO, just as much of an art. Imagine, for instance, if Lost were a series of books instead of a TV show. A skilled writer could certainly tell that (very complex) story, but we'd also miss things like the subtle grace of Charlie's sacrifice, and the ecstatic joy when Desmond calls Penny. You could describe those things in words, but without the expressions, the tone of voice and (critically!) Michael Giacchino's amazing score, a hell of a lot would be... well... lost.

Just as it's unfair to consider SFF somehow cheaper or less artistic than reality-based drama, it's also unfair to consider visually told stories cheaper than text-told ones. Each has its own merits, and should be judged on an apples-to-apples basis. Even on a personal level, I tell stories differently with my vids than with my fics. I'm rather more skilled at the latter because I have more experience with it, but I don't think that means the vids are inherently worse aside from skill issues. As a writer who's bordering on pro, it's in my best interest that people keep reading, of course, but I don't feel any personal affront when people enjoy other types of storytelling. And really, writers/readers who DO feel that way need to get over themselves.