(no subject)
Congrats to roga, queenzulu and l_eremita for correctly guessing that Sebastienne was not the name of one of my Mary Sues. Sebastian is one of my favorite names, though, not to mention the vampire hero in one of the below stories, so it wasn't far off base.
For the rest: Mitzi came in with the most votes (4), which I find intriguing. That one was a child in a Trek-verse terraforming colony who'd been imprisoned after an alien race called the Ja'Han attacked the settlement. The kid was named Sarah, but I had her call herself Mitzi when she hit her teens because it means "bitter." There was going to be this whole symbolism where by the end of the story she'd been freed and learned to love life again and cast off the nickname, but I never finished it.
I imagine Julie was a tempting choice because it's ordinary, but in fact that was the name of My Very First Self-Insert -- the one who lived only in my head, when I was no older than 7 or 8 and Julie and Crystal (and, later, after I saw FernGully, Krista/Chrysta) were the most beautiful names I could dream of. In light of recent (to me) sociopolitical and race discussions, it's... weird to think back on that and consider the influences and dominant cultures in the media I watched that told me those were the sort of names that were to be yearned for. Other than that, though, the Julie stories I used to tell myself as I lay curled up in bed are essentially the same as the ones I write for myself now.
For the one who guessed Meredith: In a tale that is terrifying but true, I named that hurt/comfort Sue after a girl at school I was fake-mad at because she was flirting with the boy I liked and he appeared to be more interested in her than in me.
And for the one who guessed Amarantha: No, I really was that naive once upon a time.
I have a lot of Thoughts on Mary Sues and growing up and writing and discovering oneself and fandom and stuff. But they will have to wait.
* * *
I am still conference-hopping but I have my vidding computer back OMG yay and today I went and got a huge-capacity external hard drive (10-cent gigabytes! I am floored at technological progress) and so I might might might be able to pull off a couple of submissions for Vividcon after all, and I have my vids-in-progress that I seriously cannot wait to get crackin' on again. First step is to finalize a proper ripping/editing/encoding process instead of the half-cracked lazy cruddy method I was using before. (For the vidding curious and/or vidding experts, my latest questions are here and here.) Computer! Ooh, I just want to hug it.
For the rest: Mitzi came in with the most votes (4), which I find intriguing. That one was a child in a Trek-verse terraforming colony who'd been imprisoned after an alien race called the Ja'Han attacked the settlement. The kid was named Sarah, but I had her call herself Mitzi when she hit her teens because it means "bitter." There was going to be this whole symbolism where by the end of the story she'd been freed and learned to love life again and cast off the nickname, but I never finished it.
I imagine Julie was a tempting choice because it's ordinary, but in fact that was the name of My Very First Self-Insert -- the one who lived only in my head, when I was no older than 7 or 8 and Julie and Crystal (and, later, after I saw FernGully, Krista/Chrysta) were the most beautiful names I could dream of. In light of recent (to me) sociopolitical and race discussions, it's... weird to think back on that and consider the influences and dominant cultures in the media I watched that told me those were the sort of names that were to be yearned for. Other than that, though, the Julie stories I used to tell myself as I lay curled up in bed are essentially the same as the ones I write for myself now.
For the one who guessed Meredith: In a tale that is terrifying but true, I named that hurt/comfort Sue after a girl at school I was fake-mad at because she was flirting with the boy I liked and he appeared to be more interested in her than in me.
And for the one who guessed Amarantha: No, I really was that naive once upon a time.
I have a lot of Thoughts on Mary Sues and growing up and writing and discovering oneself and fandom and stuff. But they will have to wait.
* * *
I am still conference-hopping but I have my vidding computer back OMG yay and today I went and got a huge-capacity external hard drive (10-cent gigabytes! I am floored at technological progress) and so I might might might be able to pull off a couple of submissions for Vividcon after all, and I have my vids-in-progress that I seriously cannot wait to get crackin' on again. First step is to finalize a proper ripping/editing/encoding process instead of the half-cracked lazy cruddy method I was using before. (For the vidding curious and/or vidding experts, my latest questions are here and here.) Computer! Ooh, I just want to hug it.