Waterfall is dead, long live Agile!
God, Dee, shut up, what, have you been holding it in for the past month? (Yes, actually, I have. Look out, I intend to WIP-purge on the weekend and all.)
Like everyone else in fandom-the-broad right now, I'm having a relationship with Inception fandom. It's a new and strange style of involvement for me. I'm writing something (which I'm hoping to finish this weekend, but I was hoping to finish it last weekend too, and look how that turned out) and every Friday-night-drinks-with-the-girls for the past month has involved some manner of discussion, but I haven't been metaing that much on LJ, nor (do I feel) that I've been reading enough to be writing.
What the hell? But right here is my dichotomy of sentiment regarding fanfic: on the one hand, it's about working through my meta conceptions regarding the characters and setting and premise; on the other hand, reinventing the wheel is boring and pointless. Just because I think xyz about character A doesn't mean that fandom needs another story detailing it. There's also the fact that mostly I note my fandom habits roughly fitting a pattern: initial production is prompted by the canon material and response to that, but subsequent production (if there is any) is prompted by fanon material. That is, I read a slew of fics delivering a particular style of Character A or interpretation of a plot element, and I go, "...no, I think it was different," and then I write a fic about how my view differs. (Yes, I'm argumentative. I have a fandom anarchist icon for a reason. But you usually get fic out of it, so what's your problem?)
Really, the problem's lack of momentum - it's taking me too long to read and definitely too long to write. In a younger time I would've written four fics by now, and read everything that wasn't nailed down. Wah wah full-time work, growed-up blah this post just got boring.
So let's talk Inception meta instead.
The thing that's really driving a lot of my thinking about the characters (and feeding into the thing I'm working on) is where they came from / what they did before this. I feel very much about the field of dreamworks that it resembles computing in the '80s or so - it's huge, it's amazing, it's new and outrageous and going places, but no one was trained to it, because when they were training, it didn't even exist. You know how there's that wanky sentiment about how fifty percent of our kids' jobs haven't even been invented yet? YES LIKE THAT. I feel like perhaps, in Ariadne, we're seeing the first of the young generation who came through a schooling system with this sort of stuff available, or maybe not even yet, because she also hasn't trained for it.
Anyway, the point is, as much as I love stories where our heroes were inherently involved in the development of the technology, or working with it at university - and I do, I love them, I love seeing them shape the tools even as the tools shape them - it seems inherently unlikely to me. So a lot of my thinking has been what they were trained in, or more specifically, what toolsets they have brought that we can now see being applied to a completely different purpose. Miles, obviously, figures heavily in this; the sensible and comfortable and obvious element of him having been Dom's teacher in, presumably, architecture or design of some nature. (That "design of some nature" gives the whole thing a very pleasant scope for Dom to have been training to be something other than a straight-up architect, though.) But actually, I think Dom has strayed - or been pushed, though I'm not sure which is more appropriate - quite far from where he began, which makes it difficult to extrapolate back from what we see.
Mal's an interesting one. I seem to cast her easily as "the natural"; the intuitive one, the feeler. She cannot rationalise the overlapping realities, she feels them. If you add into that an element of Miles having something to do with the development of the PASIV - if that's how Dom and Mal get involved - then she also has so much to prove. Well, I like it, anyway: Dom is her father's star pupil, and jealousy is a cruel, coiled curse. If I ever manage to get around to it, I would love to write so much about her.
Eames was easy: from the first moment I thought about it (at least two sheets to the wind talking shit with feminesque over large bowls of pho) I thought of him as a con artist with a whole blinding, beautiful new canvas to ply his trade across. He's the definition of fucking adaptability, and it's like this is what he was born for. Easy.
Arthur has, actually, been a source of some bafflement, which is interesting because he's the figure around which I've been building my fic. He teaches Ariadne to build and design and he knows all about Penrose steps, but at base, architecting is not what he does. What he does is problem-solve. On the fly, but from extensive research and preparation. It's more like he's involved with systems of knowledge, methodologies of project management, styles of thinking and acting. And then I was looking up Minecraft, and saw the line I used to title this post and it just clicked. Obviously, Arthur was a business management consultant. And he was good at it; the sort you pay a hundred-thousand for a two month intensive restructure of your entire organisation, after which you increase productivity by three-hundred percent and everyone just thinks differently about how you do business. The sort who restyled production lines in Japan to take it from a backwards country to the world leader in no time at all. Or, at least, he was well on his way to becoming that, because he is still young and he hadn't had time to develop quite that sort of portfolio before someone - not necessarily Cobb, but gosh isn't it pretty? - lured him into a field with so many more intricate and fascinating problems to solve.
I don't even need to think about Ariadne in here. My favourite author to edit is an architect who writes huge, sprawling, outrageously creative speculative fiction worlds, and I know if he got the chance to build dreamscapes, he would be on it harder and faster than she was. She makes utter sense. I have had many lunches and long conversations with a variant of her. *G*
Like everyone else in fandom-the-broad right now, I'm having a relationship with Inception fandom. It's a new and strange style of involvement for me. I'm writing something (which I'm hoping to finish this weekend, but I was hoping to finish it last weekend too, and look how that turned out) and every Friday-night-drinks-with-the-girls for the past month has involved some manner of discussion, but I haven't been metaing that much on LJ, nor (do I feel) that I've been reading enough to be writing.
What the hell? But right here is my dichotomy of sentiment regarding fanfic: on the one hand, it's about working through my meta conceptions regarding the characters and setting and premise; on the other hand, reinventing the wheel is boring and pointless. Just because I think xyz about character A doesn't mean that fandom needs another story detailing it. There's also the fact that mostly I note my fandom habits roughly fitting a pattern: initial production is prompted by the canon material and response to that, but subsequent production (if there is any) is prompted by fanon material. That is, I read a slew of fics delivering a particular style of Character A or interpretation of a plot element, and I go, "...no, I think it was different," and then I write a fic about how my view differs. (Yes, I'm argumentative. I have a fandom anarchist icon for a reason. But you usually get fic out of it, so what's your problem?)
Really, the problem's lack of momentum - it's taking me too long to read and definitely too long to write. In a younger time I would've written four fics by now, and read everything that wasn't nailed down. Wah wah full-time work, growed-up blah this post just got boring.
So let's talk Inception meta instead.
The thing that's really driving a lot of my thinking about the characters (and feeding into the thing I'm working on) is where they came from / what they did before this. I feel very much about the field of dreamworks that it resembles computing in the '80s or so - it's huge, it's amazing, it's new and outrageous and going places, but no one was trained to it, because when they were training, it didn't even exist. You know how there's that wanky sentiment about how fifty percent of our kids' jobs haven't even been invented yet? YES LIKE THAT. I feel like perhaps, in Ariadne, we're seeing the first of the young generation who came through a schooling system with this sort of stuff available, or maybe not even yet, because she also hasn't trained for it.
Anyway, the point is, as much as I love stories where our heroes were inherently involved in the development of the technology, or working with it at university - and I do, I love them, I love seeing them shape the tools even as the tools shape them - it seems inherently unlikely to me. So a lot of my thinking has been what they were trained in, or more specifically, what toolsets they have brought that we can now see being applied to a completely different purpose. Miles, obviously, figures heavily in this; the sensible and comfortable and obvious element of him having been Dom's teacher in, presumably, architecture or design of some nature. (That "design of some nature" gives the whole thing a very pleasant scope for Dom to have been training to be something other than a straight-up architect, though.) But actually, I think Dom has strayed - or been pushed, though I'm not sure which is more appropriate - quite far from where he began, which makes it difficult to extrapolate back from what we see.
Mal's an interesting one. I seem to cast her easily as "the natural"; the intuitive one, the feeler. She cannot rationalise the overlapping realities, she feels them. If you add into that an element of Miles having something to do with the development of the PASIV - if that's how Dom and Mal get involved - then she also has so much to prove. Well, I like it, anyway: Dom is her father's star pupil, and jealousy is a cruel, coiled curse. If I ever manage to get around to it, I would love to write so much about her.
Eames was easy: from the first moment I thought about it (at least two sheets to the wind talking shit with feminesque over large bowls of pho) I thought of him as a con artist with a whole blinding, beautiful new canvas to ply his trade across. He's the definition of fucking adaptability, and it's like this is what he was born for. Easy.
Arthur has, actually, been a source of some bafflement, which is interesting because he's the figure around which I've been building my fic. He teaches Ariadne to build and design and he knows all about Penrose steps, but at base, architecting is not what he does. What he does is problem-solve. On the fly, but from extensive research and preparation. It's more like he's involved with systems of knowledge, methodologies of project management, styles of thinking and acting. And then I was looking up Minecraft, and saw the line I used to title this post and it just clicked. Obviously, Arthur was a business management consultant. And he was good at it; the sort you pay a hundred-thousand for a two month intensive restructure of your entire organisation, after which you increase productivity by three-hundred percent and everyone just thinks differently about how you do business. The sort who restyled production lines in Japan to take it from a backwards country to the world leader in no time at all. Or, at least, he was well on his way to becoming that, because he is still young and he hadn't had time to develop quite that sort of portfolio before someone - not necessarily Cobb, but gosh isn't it pretty? - lured him into a field with so many more intricate and fascinating problems to solve.
I don't even need to think about Ariadne in here. My favourite author to edit is an architect who writes huge, sprawling, outrageously creative speculative fiction worlds, and I know if he got the chance to build dreamscapes, he would be on it harder and faster than she was. She makes utter sense. I have had many lunches and long conversations with a variant of her. *G*