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

[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 :)