The Good, the Bad, and the not sure yet ...
Good Things:
1) Broken Cover, a newly-Archived - and lovely - Pros story by my most beloved Angelfish Archivist, whose writing I would love even if I didn't adore her personally, which I do. Broken Cover is a post-Slush Fund story, and while fairly small in scope, it illustrates AA's amazing way with words and her incredibly appealng take on Bodie and Doyle and the affection between them. Sometimes I can hear the characters in my head as I read her stories, which isn't generally the case for me. Like in this exchange:
But Doyle had stopped typing and was focussed on some point deep beneath the building's foundations, hands still resting lightly on the keys. He was so pale he'd gone slightly grey with it. Bodie closed his mouth and went to drag a chair up beside him. He turned it around, straddled it and folded his arms across its backrest. "You sign it off, 'Love from Ray'."
Doyle didn't react for a second, then the set of his profile softened slightly, and one corner of his mouth twitched up. "Cretin," he advised, and Bodie gathered that he was to some extent forgiven. "God, I just can't finish this."
Bodie looked over his shoulder, read in silence for a few moments, then said, "Take a memo, Miss Doyle," and dictated for him a brief but acceptable concluding paragraph.
Doyle typed obediently - unlike his friend, he hadn't been too macho to learn how to do it by touch - and actually got a few words into Bodie's final sentence before realising it was going to read as a request for a change of partner. On grounds of his current one's extreme insensitivity.... A snort of laughter escaped him and he reached for the correction fluid.
"What, just when I've got you housetrained?"
Satisfied, Bodie straightened up. "Right, that's it. You wait in the car. I'll go and flash me charms at the nightshift secretary until she agrees to process this lot."
God, this is just so Bodie, and for me it so perfectly captures their relationship: humor and a little bit of snark, but always their priority is each other, and their deep affection for one another underlies everything .... There are many, many things about this story that I love - small instances that capture their appeal, make me smile. As always with this author, it's difficult for me to pick out specific examples and quote them, because so much of the beauty and impact is in the flow, the context. And she's such a gorgeous writer; I constantly find myself captivated, wanting to re-read and savor lines and scenes ....
This makes me very happy!
2) Some Vividcon things: smaragdgrun is coming after all - yay! - and aerye's and my Pros auction vid, by the talented and funny and endlessly patient (with me at least!) lithium_doll, will finally be shown to the world!
3) dsudis has moved to town, and I'm so looking forward to seeing more of her.
1) Bodie's stifle joint problem has gotten worse rather than better. I'm so anxious about this that I can't even bear to write about it. I've sent a video to the vet; hopefully I'll hear from them today about what to do next.
2) I have nothing to wear to Club Vivid. Last year's get-up was the high sartorial point of my fannish life and definitely a fluke - I must have been struck by a stray bolt of creative lightning that was never intended for me. I couldn't possibly ever come up with another outfit that would measure up to it (and I'm not sure I'd be brave enough to wear anything that exceeded it!), so I might as well not even bother to try. Maybe I'll just wear jeans ...
1) Vidding. I very rarely have any sort of creative impulse. And yet, over the past six months or so, more and more I've found myself thinking about vidding. The idea (the idea of vidding, that is - not a particular vid idea) first seemed totally impossible - no way could I do that. But it kept floating around in my brain, and I started to get used to it. I even mentioned it to a few people (something that is not easy for me - I still have a difficult time admitting to hopes or aspirations for fear they'll be mocked, that I'll be taken to task for having delusions of grandeur, aspiring above my station - how could you ever possibly believe that you could do that? Hah!).
And then I went further - started researching the technical aspect, which I find very fun. I got Adobe Premiere Pro and figured out how to use Avisynth to frameserve my ripped Pros VOB files into Premiere. I bought two Premiere books and read them through.
And now that I'm all ready to go, I find myself ... paralyzed. I have no idea where to start - there are 57 episodes, so many scenes - how do I figure out which one to choose? Now that it's time, I can't even remember any of them - I could re-watch or skim through them, but I don't even really know what I'm looking for. What kind of scenes work; how long should they be; what do I do with them? When should I cut to another clip? Do I have to be on the beat, do I have to be consistent, do I have to figure out in advance which beats I'm going to cut on? What if people think my song is stupid? What if the lyrics don't fully hold together - there are lines whose meaning I can't figure out, or that I can't really illustrate with a clip from my source, or that don't quite make sense for the story I'm telling?
What am I talking about - I don't have a story to tell! All I have is a vague idea that this song "fits" Pros for me. I don't have a story, don't have any musical knowledge (never learned to read music, have only the vaguest ideas about things like chords and time), don't have any artistic talent or "vision," don't know diddly about vidding or film editing technique - what the hell do I think I'm doing? There are so many amazing talented vidders - how dare I presume to play in that sandbox, having no idea what I'm doing? Plus, I've heard the scorn some of them heap on run-of-the-mill vids - and there's no way anything I produce is going to be anything more than run-of-the-mill.
I think I'm just afraid, afraid of doing this badly - or perhaps more accurately, afraid of doing it wrong. I'm so good at following rules; I was always a perfect student, always did everything right. And that's where all my self-esteem came from: the fact that I knew I could perform, could follow the rules. That's the one thing - the only thing - I ever truly believed I had to offer. But the problem with that is that it makes it difficult to try new things - because if people value me only because I do things well, that means they'll stop valuing me if I do something poorly. So when I do try new things I study and prepare and do my best to learn everything, to do it right. And true to form, I've studied and studied and studied vidding, so to speak - or at least some aspects of it - but all I've managed to do is impress on myself the difficulty of doing it well, which makes me even more afraid to try. Plus, all the studying in the world won't make me able to produce good vids, because there's more to it than that.
And that's the other half of this equation - the fact that my creative muscles, such as they are, are sadly underdeveloped. I don't really know how to stretch my imagination, to just play, to try things and see where my fancy takes me ... I don't know how to take that step, how to start. I'm always searching for the rulebook, the template. I'm not totally rulebound - when I have a template I'm able to move beyond it a bit, embellish it, at least to a certain extent. For example, the Archive - I started with astolat's "Automated Archive" scripts, and once I'd figured them out I started coming up with all sorts of ideas for improvements and new features and things tailored specifically to my archive. But I started with those scripts - I seem to always need to know where and how to start, need to have rules to follow, a pattern to base my first efforts on. With vidding, I'm faced with a song and an enormous, completely empty timeline, and I just don't even know how to begin to begin.
So why am I doing this? Fandom is a haven for me, a source of joy and pleasure - I've taken on responsibilities and obligations, yes, but I do those things because I want to, because I like them. I never want fandom to feel like work or drudgery - when something I'm doing starts feeling like a chore, a burden, an "assignment," then there's simply no reason to keep doing it. The whole vidding thing is making me feel very anxious and inadequate ... which suggests maybe I shouldn't be doing it.
And yet, and yet, and yet ... I can't seem to get rid of the urge, the itch, even though I don't really know how to scratch it, don't quite know what the urge even is. I walk around with the song(s) in my head, thinking about it, wanting to sit down at the computer, even though I don't know what to do once I'm there.
So ... I'm withholding judgment for the moment as to whether vidding is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing for me. Maybe Vividcon will help me get my thoughts in order. It could inspire me - then again, it could just intimidate me into total paralysis!
2) Vividcon. I'm really looking forward to Vividcon - but it also kind of scares me. Vividcon isn't like "other" cons - or at least not like other cons I've been to - and for some reason I find it makes me a little nervous and a lot insecure. Everyone seems so ... smart, and driven, and talented - makes me wonder what the heck I'm doing there. It's a bit less about the fannish squee than most cons I've been to - I worry that I have to turn off the squee part of me and put on the smart, mature, reasonable, "adult" part of me - the part that's dominated my whole life and that I'm generally so glad and relieved to shed in fannish contexts. I know this is silly; most of these people are fans, just like me, and many of them are people I know and like very much, and a few are people I know well and love dearly. And I had a lot of fun last year, and emerged with a new appreciation of vids that has endured and really enriched my fannish life (plus, see (1), above! *g*). Still ... for some reason the thought of going, of arriving there Thursday, gives me that nervous feeling in my stomach, that feeling that maybe I just don't belong .... But I imagine I'll get over this, and it will end up being an entirely Good Thing.