I just heard there's a rage club, but I'm too late to be a founding member.

[antennapedia]

Jolly me out of my current state of rage, please. Rage is not a usual state for me-- not honest-to-goodness grand-gesture-level fury-- and I find it unpleasant. I'm against continuing in this state. Therefore, distraction! On the theory that if there's anything as comforting as self-absorption, it's contemplating the characters I love, I propose

Comments

Hurried ? to assuage rage.

[nutterbudgie]

umm, what does Giles wear that Buffy really likes in the Blackmail 'verse? I'm talking favourite clothes here.

You have VR.5?

Re: Hurried ? to assuage rage.

[antennapedia]

I have VR.5, yes. I have not yet watched with any attention, though it does hold out the promise of ASH in full snitty mode. Which is nice.

Blackmailverse Buffy has a thing about Giles's butt, and about hip-hugging non-baggy trousers that make other attributes clear. So she likes him in the tight jeans. He doesn't, so much, but will wear them because she wants it, and because it obviously pleases her. She likes black jeans. He likes traditional faded blue jeans, and has a secret hankering for the fashions of the early 70s, pre-punk post-hippie.

She also likes him in dark, strong colors. Anything but the beige-y tweeds he used to wear. Giles's clothes are primarily visual, with some emotional secondary-kinesthetic textures creeping in. Buffy pushes that and wants to get rid of the self-effacing bagginess.

I'll visit this topic directly very soon.

[antennapedia]

1. Fandom is a herd. That means there are bellwethers. This is a complex role that combines sensitivity to trends and emotions with a trend-starting instinct. There hasn't been a stampede over to IJ because the bellwethers haven't moved yet, just a few extra-bold sheep whom the rest of us are nervously watching to see if predators eat them. If the bellwethers do something, fandom as a whole does it as well. Eventually.

Let's push this metaphor to absurdity and note that there are different herds within fandom, only loosely connected to each other. The anime fandoms seem to be their own animal. The RPF fandoms overlap more with live-action tv/movie/book media fandoms, but are still separate. HP fandom might decide to start doing something, and it'll be ages before the anime fandoms notice, never mind before their bellwethers take action.

[antennapedia]

3. Favorite fan fiction archives... I like the ones I like for content, not for features or usability or anything like that. Almost none of them are really usable, and most of them have eye-bleeding formats that make me grateful for the presence of the "zap colors" bookmarklet on my browser bar.

Of Demons & Destiny and Riposte are the archives where I've spent the most time reading.

Take the BFA: tons of stories, automatic posting, but I had to step through their posting process carefully because it was so baroque. And mistakes are unfixable. The search engine is complete and daunting. But their "quicksearch" page is an example of somebody paying attention to the ways almost everybody wants to browse the archive, and making it easy. More of that please.

[antennapedia]

2. Best tool for fandom. Hmm. The web itself has transformed fandom greatly, but that's probably too facile an answer for you.

Have I ever seen any fandom-specific tools? I've seen lots of repurposed tools: the mailing list, the blogging site, the Google docs group editing app. Fandom hasn't grokked the wiki yet; it takes even sophisticated engineering organizations a while to get it, so no surprise there. (Wiki is two concepts: a page-mangling engine that makes intrasite linking trivial, and a social concept of group ownership of information. It's the latter that takes the time.)

[kivrin]

Writing longhand - always irritatingly slow, or sometimes the only way a story will come out? Discuss.

What does Core Four Giles read for brain candy?

[antennapedia]

Cannot write longhand. Cannot. Have tried, e.g., on planes and in the bath. I have lost the trick. This makes me weep, because I love neat pens and nifty notebooks, so I buy them and have no use for them. Part of it is that I've migrated toward an inside-out approach to writing stories. There'll be some seed scene from which the rest of the story-crystal grows, so I'll write by cycling around that scene. Which is hard to do in a paper notebook.

I can take story notes longhand, though. Maundering on about background seems to be something I can do without being able to edit the words as they come out.

[kivrin]

I join you in the fruitless pen-and-notebook!love. I have a serviceable notebook that continues to see some use for notetaking and REMEMBER THIS IDEA!!! jottings, but it still doesn't see all that much use.

[truwest]

I can't either (compose anything in longhand).

I write many many Notes To Self in my series of Japanese notebooks (one notebook per topic plus one Master Notebook of Life). I love writing my notes and my to-dos and energetically marking them off as they get done.

But I cannot compose full text longhand. Not fic, not work memos, nuttin'. Hand writing 3 sentence thank-you notes feels as awkward as a grade school kid practicing writing cursive.

Emu writes all her fic drafts out longhand.

[ljs]

Re writing: do you have a favourite word you've never gotten to use (yet!) in a fic?

[antennapedia]

A favorite word, hmm! There are lots of words I love, and usually I just use them when they come to mind. The younger Scoobies have voices that allow for one kind of pyrotechnics, and Giles's voice naturally has a larger vocabulary-- though he talks in direct, clear language in the show, so again, gotta watch it. Complicating this is the deliberately plain thing I try to do, with simple declarative sentences that I hope pile up to create more complicated effects. Fun words can stick out there.

My intrepid beta-reader once edited out Giles calling somebody "juggins", which I held onto for months. I finally found an excuse to use it again (he uses it on Riley, without heat), but maybe I shouldn't have. Oh, guilt.

[seldomifever]

All righty, skip, I've been thinking about this all morning. The other day, I was reading some lovely btvs prawn when suddenly I felt completely weirded-out by the fact that fandom is mostly women sitting around writing erotica for one another's pleasure. The more I've gotten to know the authors on a personal level, the stranger the whole scene's become to me. I've been trying to sort out my thoughts on this. How do you feel about it? Both as the purveyor and purveyee, I mean.

[antennapedia]

Ha. A hard one, with many tangled answers in the tangled mess of fandom sexuality. But I'm going to stay away from that, and talk about what it is that I do when I write fiction for others to read.

Everything I write, whether prawny or not, is an attempt to manipulate the emotional state of my readers. You are willing accomplices in this manipulation, because it is a well-established form of entertainment for you. (As plotting the form of the manipulation, laboring over its means, and then watching the results is a complex form of entertainment for me. It's how we pass the time before the arrival of our inevitable mortality.) I take you all on a little trip, show you some characters experiencing something, and you have an emotional response. If I succeed, that emotional response bears some relation to the one I hoped you'd have.

Joy, grief, romantic love, anger, sympathy, relief, release, lots more-- all on the list of things I want you to feel. Sexual arousal isn't any different than the others in most ways. The only difference to

[antennapedia]

Hmm. I'd like to revise that answer if only to put the thoughts in some kind of sensible order. Bleah.

[seldomifever]

"I don't need to know the details"

*snickers*

Your response is well thought out and articulate. My feelings on this are still a bit jumbled. FF was different for me before I began chatting with the authors about tea. And cats. Still, the smut pleases me, so I am not complaining.

Was reading these fascinating articles on talking dirty this morning, which reminded me of how strange it sometimes is to have people turning each other on in this bizarre (and delightful) forum.

I haven't gotten much sleep in the past three days and it takes a toll on my thought processes. Hope I'm making at least a little bit of sense.

Oh, and speaking of sleep deprivation...I didn't really win the Tony Head phone call. Were we kidding about it last week? I was delirious at the time, and thought we were, but now I'm not so sure I made that clear. Sorry. It was 1:30am and I was fried.

God, now I sound completely off, don't I? I'll just stop chattering then. Right.