oh what a night

[flambeau]

When I woke up this morning I found tinsel in my shoes. Holiday parties - they follow you home! I'm scared to open the closet in case a choir leaps out and bellows Silent Night at me. But I have my favorite seasonal decoration on the fridge: my RotK ticket. I wonder if it'll still be valid if I sketch little sparkly reindeer on it

Comments

[synecdochic]

It's mostly in how the writer uses them, I think. "Cock" will still do it for me for the most part, as will "dick", but there are certain times for each and it takes a very zen approach towards figuring out which is appropriate at any given time. "Fuck" is a fun word, as is "cunt", but only when it's being used to describe someone's personality and not their anatomy :)

No throbbing rods, no quivering manhoods, no love-meat, no romance novel euphemisms. I am of the "fuck like real people and not like pornstars or romance novel characters" school of thought ..

Regarding the whole polyfandomorous thing that destina posted, I think that there's a real difference betwen "I want to write a story about $THEME, and $FANDOM is popular this season, so I'll write it with those characters," and "$FANDOM_CHARACTERS really show $THEME well, I think I'll try and write it." There's a lot of the former going on in fandom -- primarily in anime fandoms, actually, which is where I used to be, long ago, and which is where I made all my fandom mistakes before slinking into popslash -- in that people *will* keep writing the same plot over and over again with different characters grafted on. I think that the critical difference for polyfandomorous people should be which comes first when settling down to write a story -- the theme or the plot.

But I think that there's a different between having a "one true plot" and a "one true story". I've seen a lot of people who deal with the same themes in their work all the time, and I know that if you look at my stuff about half of it fits my One True Story (which really should be called a One True Theme the way I'm thinking about it) and half of it doesn't. I don't think that authors are unqualified to answer the question, just that authors might have a *different* answer than readers. There's legitimacy in that -- a reader always comes up with something that the author doesn't, that's part of the dialog between author and reader, and it's great to have an environment in fandom where that textual dialog can become an actual dialog! Like, I mean, I could say that I think your stories (at least your popslash stories) are primarily about telling the truth (not in words, but in actions) and about the responsibility that people have to each other, both self-assumed and externally imposed, but you might look at me sideways and say "what are you on about?" But it's what *I* get out of your stories, and it's why I love your writing so much, because those are both themes that I hold near and dear to my heart.

I don't think it's so much a "what plot do I keep writing over and over again", though in the hands of someone who's less self-aware of her writing and her writing process this meme can be. I think that personal textual criticism can be a really powerful tool for an author, because it allows her to step back and take a look at her work and realize what themes she keeps working with, so she can start doing it consciously rather than unconsciously. I had my personal One True Theme epiphany about four months before I started writing popslash, and I think that my popslash is infinitely better than any of the rest of the stuff I've been doing because of it -- enough so that I wanted a break from my previous fandom identity. Not every one of my popslash stories deals with my OTT, but I'm getting to the point where I can recognize the ones that *do* and do it deliberately, you know?

Then again, this all could just be wank. Wank wank wank. I wouldn't feel bad about not being drawn to the wank if I were you ;)

[flambeau]

See, this is why I think it's neat to have others look for one's themes and recurring narratives. I'd never have come up with the honesty and responsibility themes, but they feel very right. What do you think your own (current) OTT is?

I love it when people sit back and really think about what they write. And I really have no issues with someone who wants to write the same story over and over in the same or a new fandom (I can live without the endless loop of partner rape, but certain types of first-time stories are like chocolate bars to me, and if I find a chocolate bar I like, I don't need for it to taste different the next time), as long as you don't deny that that is, in fact, what you're doing. Repeated cries of "it's not the same story! it's very specifically about these characters!" sometimes confuse me...

As I grow older and older and totter towards the tomb, I develop issues with more and more words, sometimes enough to react negatively to them when they're used in some other perfectly innocent context - oh no, another pucker, bud, rod, nub... Tiny Nubs and Thick Rods, a study of size issues in fannish erotic writing! At least ass and cock are still neutral, even if they've ended up being about as sexy as flowerpots for me.

[synecdochic]

My current OTT is actually the OTT that most of my stuff has included from day one -- inevitability. It's about a thing that needs to be done, and there's only one person who can do it, and that may be good and it may be bad but the one thing it isn't is avoidable. Or maybe it's about a bunch of choices that were made a long time ago, and those choices have all piled up and led you to this place and time, and you still have your free will now, but you've got a limited number of choices due to situation and everything you choose is going to be colored by things that you already chose. Or maybe it's about making choices that you have to make because of who and what you are, your ethics or your morals or your personality, and dealing with the way that those choices shake down -- not not having a choice, but having a choice that you struggle against because there's only one viable choice and it sucks. Each of my short stories starts ten minutes after the literary climax of the larger story it takes part in, and heads downhill from there. (I've been writing a Final Fantasy 7 fan novel for the past five years which I am writing solely for a scene in chapter 22, but unless I'd written the previous 21 chapters, that scene wouldn't be inevitable and so it wouldn't mean as much. The minute I put those characters on the screen, the end was clear -- to me, at least.)

I do not have any particular hot-button words that will yank me out of the story, but the thing that gets me is when the author doesn't consider what words she's using -- for instance, if the story itself is gritty and realistic, and then it's time for the sex and it turns into a blushing, simpering virgin about its language choices. Or vice versa. Context, context, context :)