(no subject)
Yuletide is coming! I'm ridiculously excited considering it's only September, but whatever. September isn't too early to start working on my Dear Author letter, right? Right.
It's a bit of a weird time for me right now, though, what with my hockey fandom experience brought to an abrupt halt and all. I'm still quite mournful over the thousands of words in WIPs that I'll never finish. Of course that isn't the most important thing given the situation, but it's one of the most painful ways it affects me personally. I'm just hoping I'll be able to find a way to use them for something else, someday. In the meantime, I've been deleting hockey related bookmarks and have orphaned my three fics.
I'm sort of at a loose end right now. Not to say that I'm not enjoying it; I have so many ideas for so many fandoms, and I'm hoping to get to all of them. And, of course, a few Supernatural fics simmering on the back burner. I don't think I'll ever really be done writing for Supernatural. I have one fic in the works that I'm enjoying a hell of a lot - where Sam dies instead of Jess, and Jess and Dean go on the road together. There's a larger plot, and possibly Samzazel, but what I'm exploring right now is the atmosphere between Jess and Dean, the grief with no place to go. One of the reasons I love Supernatural is that it has that staple of road trip fiction; the claustrophobia, the intimacy that you can't really escape. Supernatural uses it between two people who know each other very well; I'm going to try it with two people who don't know each other at all - except through Sam, of course. And it creates this sort of festering tension where they can't let go of Sam, because in some way he's the only thing they have in common, and they also don't want to let go of Sam, because they both love him. But of course there's an intrinsic problem with making a dead person the focus of all your attention, because they become present in everything, while of course not really being there at all. Anyway. I still have a lot more that I need to work out. It's probably not gonna get written for a while, because Yuletide becomes sort of all-encompassing for me, I've found.
I've been reading My Life by Lyn Hejinian. It's a memoir, but a purposely incoherent one, made up of unrelated sentences. An excerpt:
A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple-though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity. The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains which were never loosened. Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity which never intrudes. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition.
I read an excerpt of it last year in one of my classes, and had been hungering to read the rest of it ever since. I didn't get a copy for a while because I was sort of worried that the charm wouldn't last for a hundred-odd pages, and I'd be left with a book I'd never read. When I finally caved and got it, though, I didn't find that a problem at all. Even though it's disjointed and unconnected, it's still enthralling. There are repeating lines, and lines that seem related. Even though it never directly tells a full story, only shows tiny moments, I still left feeling like I had gotten a story, one I just didn't know how to connect.
Memory is fascinating that way. To the writer, or her parents or siblings, all or some of the images might have meaning and context. You can imagine entire stories and lives fanning out from any one of the lines.
It's a bit of a weird time for me right now, though, what with my hockey fandom experience brought to an abrupt halt and all. I'm still quite mournful over the thousands of words in WIPs that I'll never finish. Of course that isn't the most important thing given the situation, but it's one of the most painful ways it affects me personally. I'm just hoping I'll be able to find a way to use them for something else, someday. In the meantime, I've been deleting hockey related bookmarks and have orphaned my three fics.
I'm sort of at a loose end right now. Not to say that I'm not enjoying it; I have so many ideas for so many fandoms, and I'm hoping to get to all of them. And, of course, a few Supernatural fics simmering on the back burner. I don't think I'll ever really be done writing for Supernatural. I have one fic in the works that I'm enjoying a hell of a lot - where Sam dies instead of Jess, and Jess and Dean go on the road together. There's a larger plot, and possibly Samzazel, but what I'm exploring right now is the atmosphere between Jess and Dean, the grief with no place to go. One of the reasons I love Supernatural is that it has that staple of road trip fiction; the claustrophobia, the intimacy that you can't really escape. Supernatural uses it between two people who know each other very well; I'm going to try it with two people who don't know each other at all - except through Sam, of course. And it creates this sort of festering tension where they can't let go of Sam, because in some way he's the only thing they have in common, and they also don't want to let go of Sam, because they both love him. But of course there's an intrinsic problem with making a dead person the focus of all your attention, because they become present in everything, while of course not really being there at all. Anyway. I still have a lot more that I need to work out. It's probably not gonna get written for a while, because Yuletide becomes sort of all-encompassing for me, I've found.
I've been reading My Life by Lyn Hejinian. It's a memoir, but a purposely incoherent one, made up of unrelated sentences. An excerpt:
A moment yellow, just as four years later, when my father returned home from the war, the moment of greeting him, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, younger, thinner than when he had left, was purple-though moments are no longer so colored. Somewhere, in the background, rooms share a pattern of small roses. Pretty is as pretty does. In certain families, the meaning of necessity is at one with the sentiment of pre-necessity. The better things were gathered in a pen. The windows were narrowed by white gauze curtains which were never loosened. Here I refer to irrelevance, that rigidity which never intrudes. Hence, repetitions, free from all ambition.
I read an excerpt of it last year in one of my classes, and had been hungering to read the rest of it ever since. I didn't get a copy for a while because I was sort of worried that the charm wouldn't last for a hundred-odd pages, and I'd be left with a book I'd never read. When I finally caved and got it, though, I didn't find that a problem at all. Even though it's disjointed and unconnected, it's still enthralling. There are repeating lines, and lines that seem related. Even though it never directly tells a full story, only shows tiny moments, I still left feeling like I had gotten a story, one I just didn't know how to connect.
Memory is fascinating that way. To the writer, or her parents or siblings, all or some of the images might have meaning and context. You can imagine entire stories and lives fanning out from any one of the lines.