Interview meme

May 21, 2010 13:41

From luckykitty, the usual:

1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

1) SSBB, Chinese Radio podcasts... You seem to be involved in a lot of cool stuff. What's your favorite project that you've been involved in?

I am not involved in a lot of cool stuff. XD SSBB, my radio show, that's pretty much it. I do a bit of desultory volunteering for S.W.A.P., because I know the chief organizer and I'm a genuine fan of what they do.

My favorite is SSBB for sure, in terms of what it's done for me as a person, and the actual track record of the thing. I won't say it's the most rewarding project I participate in right now, but that's because it's been ongoing for a long time and I've accomplished most of what I'd wanted from it.

2) I always enjoy reading your fandom discussions! Is there a particular fandom, past or present, that really gets you talking?

2) Doctor Who definitely gets me talking. With some (most) fandoms it's a knockdown fight between public posting and crippling embarrassment, which is illogical as I'm sure fandom discussions are the major reason most of my flist reads me, but there you go. With FFXII I squirrelled a few posts away on carnet; with Trek it was DW. I managed to post almost nothing publically about the ineffable rabbit hole of Libs fandom, though I wrote a grillion emails. Mirage of Blaze was a bunch of public posts that I'm pretty sure the fandom uses as resources to this day, and an order of magnitude greater volume of chatlog text. XD; It's all saved somewhere.

Basically I... don't like to be seen caring about shit in public. I think. Because I'm too cool for school. XD;

...My mind's skipped ahead, thinking about the series I didn't/don't have a problem writing about ad infinitum - JoJo, GetBackers, Tenipuri - and they clearly do have in common a sort of... gnarliness? weirdness? granularity? koganbot has this term in his book: "context of abundance". Basically there is something there that purports to be a plot, and characters to whom plot happens, but that stuff barely holds together an AVALANCHE of data and data-potentiality, torrents of minutiae rolling by unremarked, like a Manhattan-eating gelatinous blob with a tiny solid heart. The plot and characters can touch anything, borrow from anything, incorporate anything. If the writer had it for breakfast, it's in there somewhere. DW is like this too, obviously. It should really be more of a writing fandom for me, but its size plays against that. I very much prefer reading fic to writing it. XD;;

3) You're a wonderful writer--the PMK fic you wrote ages ago still resonates for me, long after I've left the fandom. Are you still writing these days? If so, can you share a little about it?

Thankee for the kind words. ^^ I'm still writing, not as much as I should (ain't that always the case). I wrote a story for Yuletide last year. Lately I've been using 750words.com as a tool, although most of what I've input there isn't fiction. What I've learnt from the exercise is that my daily count is 500-1000 words, except when I'm away from the computer. But it doesn't feel like work unless it's fiction.

William Gibson (yeah, I know) took a round of interview questions online recently; of course people asked him about his writing "process", and he described it as a fourmillement, termites chewing on wood. There's no real sense of forward motion. I'm often surprised by theses that emerge on paper (my theses are mostly emergent), but never by story. That's not the way my mind works. Story I have to construct with logic-tools, distributing weight and measuring angles, the way one builds a house. It's just a means to an end, anyway, which is the feeling you're left with after you read a short story or novel, the fuzzy sense of it you retain (being "put through the wringer"; un-taxing comfort; every word building to a punchline; bitter-sweetness; and so on). Usually I start with the feeling I want and reverse-engineer the way in which it's induced. But I don't define the feeling in words, I just feel it. It's like when someone says a word in Chinese or Japanese and you get a ripple in your mind but it hasn't turned into English yet (and won't without effort, if the concept is sufficiently subtle/obtuse), so it just exists as meaning outside of language.

It's a quirk of my personality that I'm (usually) bored by stories that don't have strong plot features, so I can't write pieces that are "all feeling". Whatever the hell that means. XD

4) Food! What's your favorite food or type of food? Do you have a "go to" food that you love to eat?

Dumplings. XD Dumplings or fried chicken. I had both in the past 48 hours. These days I just buy the bags of frozen dumplings and eat them whenever I can't be bothered to cook anything else (not that often, actually, since I like cooking). If I get tired of them I'll stop.

Basically I've always been a protein kind of kid - I'd rather snack on pork rinds than candy. (Candy contains more calories, by the way.) When allowed to fend for myself I naturally drift toward a low-carb diet, especially in summer: lots of meat, lots of vegetables, some dairy, a grudging serving or two of fruit. This is having hilarious consequences right now as G put me on the same exercise routine he and D engage in, faute de choix, which I'm dimly aware is a muscle-building sort of thing because they are dudes. I've not lost that much weight, going by the scale, but clothes tell a different story. Meaning I must have gained six or seven pounds of muscle in the past month.

5) What's the most exotic place you've ever been? Any neat stories to tell about your time there?

Everywhere is exotic to somebody, right? XD Venice was exotic, I guess, in that its topology - its semiotics - just isn't like that of any other city. And Ubatuba was exotic, in that it's the sort of place people mean when they talk about "exotic locations" - white sand beaches, islands, and not many foreign tourists. But I looked it up on Google Earth, sometime after I got home, and there are plenty of photos online: it's not a mystery.

In general I'm not much for exoticity as a criterion XD - I prefer to vacation in famous cities with famous museums, and I prefer botanical gardens to forests. I don't want to be wowed by foreignness so much as I want to learn to be at home everywhere, which when I'm lazy means falling back on a hipster-consumerist aesthetic that's available all over the world nowadays, like McDonald's. Follow the signs for Uniqlo and cappuccino foam art.

In other news: arboretum, I got your cards in the post, just fyi. I really asked for the Plushenko for my sister, she was very pleased. XD

real life, meme

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