30 days of babble, dec 20 - first fandom, and dec 21 - long fics
happy solstice! after today the days get longer. YAY.
today i walked a lot, acquired a camera (late birthday present) (it's red :D ), acquired a new phone (i was due for an upgrade) (as my dad says, i have now been brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century >.< ), bought some comics (astro city and saga) (i thought i just got a new saga a couple weeks ago), and did some laundry. woo. i need to wrap some hanukah presents so i can exchange with the family unit tomorrow, and i'd like to fill a couple of the wishes i said i'd do for insmallpackages, and at some point i'll probably be hungry enough for dinner.
also, THERE WERE GIRL SCOUTS IN HARVARD SQUARE SELLING COOKIES. O.O probably because girl scout cookies make excellent christmas presents. not that this is a hint or anything.
yesterday's month of babble topic was my first fandom, for moonmelody, and that's poison elves, the fandom by which all other fandoms were judged. (at least until i'd been in spn long enough for that to be the fandom by which all other fandoms were judged. but pe was first.) pe was (actually kind of still is) a b/w comic book written and drawn by a guy named drew hayes. he passed away a few years ago but evidently someone resurrected the comic, because it's out again. the fandom as i knew it was on a tiny mailing list - who remembers juno? - and then it was a slightly larger mailing list, and we'd talk about the new issues when they came out, but since it came out every other month, there was a lot of down time. so we talked about all kinds of other things, a lot of them not exactly related to the comic. life, the universe, everything. :D altho there was some fanart, and the occasional fanfic, and a couple pics of people's fannish tattoos. and, you know, bitching and moaning and whining and complaining and squeeing and kerfuffling and whathaveyou. but the fic and the art and whatever was never the main point, and in fact was never really a huge part of anyone's discussion. we called ourselves the guild, after the thieves' and assassins' guild in the comic, and while i don't remember drew ever being a big presence, his girlfriend was for a while, and i think we kind of always knew he was there somewhere.
i went to wizardworld chicago one year to meet up with a few fellow fen - and stayed with my friend amy who lived in, uh, evanston? i think? she was not a fangirl but we'd been friends since we were five and i hadn't seen her in a long time - and i had such a good time i did it for the next four years. i cosplayed one year (for which i made obnoxiously tall pointy ears out of armature wire and tape and papier-mache, and it took no lie three different adhesives and the help of several people to make the things stick to my head, and then duchess-webb drove to the con and i couldn't even sit up in the back seat >.< ) and i got to meet comic book people whose work i liked and tell them i liked it, and a bunch of us from the guild sacrificed a virgin to drew. (we called him the dark lord, and my participation in the sacrifice made me a high priestess.) this is by far and away my favoritest fan story. :D nothing i have ever done at wincon can hold a candle to the sacrifice of the blessed virgin larry at wizardworld chicago. he was eighteen and completely adorable, and between when he volunteered to be sacrificed and when we actually went to the con, he slept with his girlfriend. and he felt bad about it! so we re-virginized him. there was a whole ceremony with a procession and chanting and a sacrificial knife (it was a plastic prop knife) and everything. somewhere there exists a picture of drew sitting behind his table with his head in his hands, clearly amused and possibly a little embarrassed by his bugnuts fans. one of his fellow comic book writers told him he had the craziest fans. but it was fun. we enjoyed making a spectacle of ourselves.
the people i know on lj who i knew before lj - and who are not ephemera or shivering-lance - this is how i know them. (i met jola through the guild and she told me once she's known me longer than she's known her husband, which i find so incredibly strange.) the guild was welcoming and weird and friendly and yes, those of us who had been there a while got tired of repeating things for the new folks, but we did repeat things for the new folks. for a brief period and due to the fact i'd been there long enough to be the old guard, i was actually a reasonably-sized fish in a small pond. (the few years i was active in spn fandom, even tho it did feel like a smallish pond in the beginning, i never felt like anything other than a small fish.) i eventually drifted from the guild, but it was an amicable parting and i remember it fondly. the guild is even responsible for me being on lj, because back in the day when you needed a code to join, duchess-webb gave me one.
pe is kind of the random fandom that no one has ever heard of, altho every so often someone knows what i'm talking about - i wore my guild t-shirt at wincon this year and dauntdraws recognized it - and when that happens i always do a little dance of glee. (usually in my head.)
and the topic for today - i'm on time for once! - is writing looong stories, for desertport. my favorite way to do it is to write and post a lot of little bits that when put all together make a long story. this way i don't have to worry about having plotted it out in advance. (which is really hard. i'm totally a pantser, not a plotter.) and i have the attention span of a gnat on crack, and that goes for writing as well as reading. this is actually kind of how nano works for me, in the sense that i post each installment as i write it on smackenzie, altho none of the installments are supposed to stand on their own as discrete fics. a looong story - at least bigbang length - takes a long time, because i got into the habit of typing and posting right away, and i just can't write that long a story in one sitting. i only write really long fics for bigbang or nano, and my bangs take MONTHS. the gangster story took nine months to write. well, the fic of a thousand cameos was actually written for nano, so it only took november. and the circusbang only took two and a half months, altho that's because i started late because it wasn't my first idea. (this is just first drafts. add another couple months for edits and swearing.) i feel accomplished when they're done, altho a lot of time it's a very relieved "oh thank god i don't have to do that any more" kind of accomplishment, because i can only write one thing at a time, and extended fics take up pretty much all my writer brain. i always feel a little creatively adrift when nano ends or i post my bigbang. because i spend so much time with the story - thinking about it and researching for it and whining about it and sharing my ridiculous ideas with people, if not actually writing it - to finally be done with it is always a little weird. and then i look back at it and remember all the things i totally forgot to put in. >.<
i am honestly not sure how much i love the actual writing of really long things. i like the instant gratification that comes from posting a story and having people read it, and then posting another one and having people read that, and i like being able to feel like i finished something more than twice a year. but i can't really write a short story and be done with it, because nine times out of ten there's more to the characters and their lives and their history, and longer fics are in a lot of ways much more satisfying. but it's also really hard for me to sustain an extended plot and to stretch character growth and change over tens of thousands of words of a single story. i lose track of what's going on, or i drag things out. pacing is hard because i don't really know how to do it, and if i'm going to produce 20k or 50k words of a single story, i have to be able to to balance all the various elements so the end result hangs together and makes an enjoyable read. so there's always going to be a certain amount of whining during the process.
a lot of the time i'm proud of my long fics for the simple reason that they exist, because it means i could sustain a single story for longer than a few thousand words. i mean, i do nano every year to prove to myself that i still can. and i like having long fics in my repertoire. so i write them twice a year, complain a bit, and am proud of myself when they're done. and if i did my job right, people read them and like them.
in completely other news, vikings returns february 27! (potential) canonical threesomes and occasionally-baffled completely adorable priests for the win. :D and hannibal comes back february 28! don't watch while you're eating.
and in that vein, if i asked if it was too late to order chinese food, someone would tell me of course not, it's never too late for chinese food, wouldn't they.
today i walked a lot, acquired a camera (late birthday present) (it's red :D ), acquired a new phone (i was due for an upgrade) (as my dad says, i have now been brought kicking and screaming into the 21st century >.< ), bought some comics (astro city and saga) (i thought i just got a new saga a couple weeks ago), and did some laundry. woo. i need to wrap some hanukah presents so i can exchange with the family unit tomorrow, and i'd like to fill a couple of the wishes i said i'd do for insmallpackages, and at some point i'll probably be hungry enough for dinner.
also, THERE WERE GIRL SCOUTS IN HARVARD SQUARE SELLING COOKIES. O.O probably because girl scout cookies make excellent christmas presents. not that this is a hint or anything.
yesterday's month of babble topic was my first fandom, for moonmelody, and that's poison elves, the fandom by which all other fandoms were judged. (at least until i'd been in spn long enough for that to be the fandom by which all other fandoms were judged. but pe was first.) pe was (actually kind of still is) a b/w comic book written and drawn by a guy named drew hayes. he passed away a few years ago but evidently someone resurrected the comic, because it's out again. the fandom as i knew it was on a tiny mailing list - who remembers juno? - and then it was a slightly larger mailing list, and we'd talk about the new issues when they came out, but since it came out every other month, there was a lot of down time. so we talked about all kinds of other things, a lot of them not exactly related to the comic. life, the universe, everything. :D altho there was some fanart, and the occasional fanfic, and a couple pics of people's fannish tattoos. and, you know, bitching and moaning and whining and complaining and squeeing and kerfuffling and whathaveyou. but the fic and the art and whatever was never the main point, and in fact was never really a huge part of anyone's discussion. we called ourselves the guild, after the thieves' and assassins' guild in the comic, and while i don't remember drew ever being a big presence, his girlfriend was for a while, and i think we kind of always knew he was there somewhere.
i went to wizardworld chicago one year to meet up with a few fellow fen - and stayed with my friend amy who lived in, uh, evanston? i think? she was not a fangirl but we'd been friends since we were five and i hadn't seen her in a long time - and i had such a good time i did it for the next four years. i cosplayed one year (for which i made obnoxiously tall pointy ears out of armature wire and tape and papier-mache, and it took no lie three different adhesives and the help of several people to make the things stick to my head, and then duchess-webb drove to the con and i couldn't even sit up in the back seat >.< ) and i got to meet comic book people whose work i liked and tell them i liked it, and a bunch of us from the guild sacrificed a virgin to drew. (we called him the dark lord, and my participation in the sacrifice made me a high priestess.) this is by far and away my favoritest fan story. :D nothing i have ever done at wincon can hold a candle to the sacrifice of the blessed virgin larry at wizardworld chicago. he was eighteen and completely adorable, and between when he volunteered to be sacrificed and when we actually went to the con, he slept with his girlfriend. and he felt bad about it! so we re-virginized him. there was a whole ceremony with a procession and chanting and a sacrificial knife (it was a plastic prop knife) and everything. somewhere there exists a picture of drew sitting behind his table with his head in his hands, clearly amused and possibly a little embarrassed by his bugnuts fans. one of his fellow comic book writers told him he had the craziest fans. but it was fun. we enjoyed making a spectacle of ourselves.
the people i know on lj who i knew before lj - and who are not ephemera or shivering-lance - this is how i know them. (i met jola through the guild and she told me once she's known me longer than she's known her husband, which i find so incredibly strange.) the guild was welcoming and weird and friendly and yes, those of us who had been there a while got tired of repeating things for the new folks, but we did repeat things for the new folks. for a brief period and due to the fact i'd been there long enough to be the old guard, i was actually a reasonably-sized fish in a small pond. (the few years i was active in spn fandom, even tho it did feel like a smallish pond in the beginning, i never felt like anything other than a small fish.) i eventually drifted from the guild, but it was an amicable parting and i remember it fondly. the guild is even responsible for me being on lj, because back in the day when you needed a code to join, duchess-webb gave me one.
pe is kind of the random fandom that no one has ever heard of, altho every so often someone knows what i'm talking about - i wore my guild t-shirt at wincon this year and dauntdraws recognized it - and when that happens i always do a little dance of glee. (usually in my head.)
and the topic for today - i'm on time for once! - is writing looong stories, for desertport. my favorite way to do it is to write and post a lot of little bits that when put all together make a long story. this way i don't have to worry about having plotted it out in advance. (which is really hard. i'm totally a pantser, not a plotter.) and i have the attention span of a gnat on crack, and that goes for writing as well as reading. this is actually kind of how nano works for me, in the sense that i post each installment as i write it on smackenzie, altho none of the installments are supposed to stand on their own as discrete fics. a looong story - at least bigbang length - takes a long time, because i got into the habit of typing and posting right away, and i just can't write that long a story in one sitting. i only write really long fics for bigbang or nano, and my bangs take MONTHS. the gangster story took nine months to write. well, the fic of a thousand cameos was actually written for nano, so it only took november. and the circusbang only took two and a half months, altho that's because i started late because it wasn't my first idea. (this is just first drafts. add another couple months for edits and swearing.) i feel accomplished when they're done, altho a lot of time it's a very relieved "oh thank god i don't have to do that any more" kind of accomplishment, because i can only write one thing at a time, and extended fics take up pretty much all my writer brain. i always feel a little creatively adrift when nano ends or i post my bigbang. because i spend so much time with the story - thinking about it and researching for it and whining about it and sharing my ridiculous ideas with people, if not actually writing it - to finally be done with it is always a little weird. and then i look back at it and remember all the things i totally forgot to put in. >.<
i am honestly not sure how much i love the actual writing of really long things. i like the instant gratification that comes from posting a story and having people read it, and then posting another one and having people read that, and i like being able to feel like i finished something more than twice a year. but i can't really write a short story and be done with it, because nine times out of ten there's more to the characters and their lives and their history, and longer fics are in a lot of ways much more satisfying. but it's also really hard for me to sustain an extended plot and to stretch character growth and change over tens of thousands of words of a single story. i lose track of what's going on, or i drag things out. pacing is hard because i don't really know how to do it, and if i'm going to produce 20k or 50k words of a single story, i have to be able to to balance all the various elements so the end result hangs together and makes an enjoyable read. so there's always going to be a certain amount of whining during the process.
a lot of the time i'm proud of my long fics for the simple reason that they exist, because it means i could sustain a single story for longer than a few thousand words. i mean, i do nano every year to prove to myself that i still can. and i like having long fics in my repertoire. so i write them twice a year, complain a bit, and am proud of myself when they're done. and if i did my job right, people read them and like them.
in completely other news, vikings returns february 27! (potential) canonical threesomes and occasionally-baffled completely adorable priests for the win. :D and hannibal comes back february 28! don't watch while you're eating.
and in that vein, if i asked if it was too late to order chinese food, someone would tell me of course not, it's never too late for chinese food, wouldn't they.