New Podfic: Edge of Snow is up! +blather on writing

[arrow00]

Eee! nos4a2no9 has gone and done recorded Edge of Snow as a fantastic podfic.

Her voice is perfect for reading Fraser 1st person, and for that I am so grateful, because Fraser is a tough nut to crack and it's not an easy story. Be sure to visit her LJ and give her fb because we just don't have enough people willing to record podfics. It's a long and

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[isiscolo]

Friendsfriends is a LJ function that is available to paid accounts; it lets you look at the most recent posts by people who your friendslist have friended, but you don't. I look at it when I have the time. It's a good way of expanding my social circle on LJ, although I also end up skimming past quite a lot of (what is to me) boring crap.

And you can call me Isis - isiscolo is my username, because Isis is always taken by the time I get there. :-) I natter on a lot about writing and process; you can see my 'writing' lj tag. You might be particularly interested in this post on plot and how I write long, plotty stories.

And hee, way to deflate my writerly ego, there; the Rae story just got recced on crack_van so I was feeling pretty proud of myself, and here comes a reality check that not everybody knows me or what I've written! Anyway, it's a bodyswap story which combines elements of both het and slash: Rae wakes up in an alternate reality in which she is, and apparently always has been, a man named Ray. You might find my story notes interesting whether or not you read the story, and you can find them here (they don't spoil the actual story too much) The story is here: Being Ray Kowalski; it's just over 50,000 words, and not only is it NC17, the cover illustration is a beautiful and very not-worksafe drawing by j_s_cavalcante.

The thing is, the whole story is a fish-out-of-water thing, that Rae finds herself in a male body and in a world where things have happened in subtly different ways. Staying strictly in her POV helped me build reader identification with her (because it's risky, creating a character who is not strictly a canon character, and trying to convince the reader to care about her) and also to maintain the nervous feeling that Rae has in worrying about Fraser's feelings and motivations, because the reader can only know how he's reacting to the change in his partner through the filter of Rae's experience. Alternating with Fraser's POV would have killed that.

Anyway, I'd be delighted (of course) if you'd read it.

[arrow00]

eep! No writerly puncturing intended. It looks like your story fell in my dead zone: I was in a full hand cast and off-line for a couple of months when I shattered my finger at the end of October. I haven't had a chance to catch up fully since I don't read that much fic--no time, and generally want to be writing instead of reading, although I do both.

Staying strictly in her POV helped me build reader identification with her (because it's risky, creating a character who is not strictly a canon character, and trying to convince the reader to care about her)

Good point, and smart thinking. It's very difficult to write a story entirely from an original character's POV, and especially difficult for a story of that length. That's quite an achievement, and it looks like your readers really loved it.

You write in your story notes: I mean, it's a (typically female) slasher's dream, isn't it? To wake up in a male body - and not just any male body, but the body of one of our slash objects.

It's an interesting question. I don't think it's true for me. I love the two guys. I am in it for the two guys, and want my involvement to be completely vicarious. Flitting back and forth and inside one guy's head and then the other... Except that doesn't cover it fully. Truth is, my relationship with slash is so freakin' complicated that even though I think about it all the time I still haven't figured it out.

Which is *not* to say it isn't a brilliant idea or that I wouldn't love your story. I'm just making a more general point that different slashers enjoy slash...differently. I recently did a con panel on the Psychosexuality of Slash wherein I took a survey and was *shocked* at how very wide the differences can be. Amazed. You'd think, because slash is so popular, that there would be a lot of solid commonalities, but there really aren't. There's no one thing you can point to and say "80% of slashers like this" It's more like 40%, 20%, 5, 1, .0002 ... Really fascinating.

[isiscolo]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that all slash writers and readers have the same motivation. I totally agree with you that there are lots of differences among us. What I meant (and expressed poorly) was that - this is kind of what we virtually do. We (and by that I mean the overwhelmingly female majority, as there are certainly male slash writers) put ourselves in the head of a male character, and imagine his bodily responses. I don't have a penis of my own, so if I'm writing sex scenes I am translating the emotions and the sensations that I experience when I'm turned on into a body that I only imagine I have.

(I kind of consider the story partly a metacomment on the phenomenon of women writing m/m sex, which I still find fascinating as a sort of social/psychological expression even though I've been doing it for five years. I don't mean to suggest that we have a solid bloc rationale!)

And really, Rae isn't completely an original character: she is my conception of who Ray would have been had he been born female, but of course my conception might not be the reader's conception, so I have to sell this characterization. Which is not a lot different from any AU, really, where you must convince the reader that e.g. had Fraser not had his father the famous Mountie to live up to, he would have become a geologist.

[arrow00]

We (and by that I mean the overwhelmingly female majority, as there are certainly male slash writers) put ourselves in the head of a male character, and imagine his bodily responses.

I get it. What a neat concept. You'd sorta have to remember *how* you write in order to write what Rae is thinking as newly male. It would be much easier to write a newly female Ray--you definitely took the hard road. ;)

Writing regular slash for me is a combination of translation, and projection. When I can get my boyfriends to talk I make them give me fodder. But mostly I think it's what I wish guys would feel--and I'm sure it's wrong 99% of the time, but it works for me.

[isiscolo]

Yeah, we're not so much writing men as we are writing what we wish men would be! But hey, we are (mostly) writing for other women who also prefer these idealized men, so. :-)