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Posts Tagged ‘fanfiction’

Trans activism, language, and Yuletide

I know, I know — that’s a very motley assortment of things to stick in one post. But I’m going out of town tomorrow, and the rest of today is liable to be very busy, so I’d rather combine them than let one fall through the cracks.

The serious and important one first: I have signed on to this statement in support of trans-inclusive feminism. Because I know several people for whom this is not a matter of theory or debate, but their daily lives, and anything I can do to make that easier for them is absolutely worth doing.

Signing a statement is a minor thing, but I hope that mentioning it here is a larger one. And yes, I am thinking about ways to reflect this in my writing.

On a lighter note, my post at SF Novelists this month is “Lingua universalis fantasiae”, on the tendency of fantasy worlds to default to a “Common Tongue.” Comments on that post should go over there on SF Novelists, por favor.

Finally, and most frivolously, Yuletide nominations are open. Yes, I know it’s only September; we’re on a leisurely schedule this year, rather than cramming everything into November. The Yuletide member community is here as usual, if you are looking for more info and discussion.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/597578.html. Comment here or there.

I don’t have to work on anything right now, so I’m procrastinating with a meme

Several of my fanfic-writing friends have been doing a meme wherein they post the first lines of their last twenty-one fics. Because I don’t feel like doing anything more mentally taxing right now than faffing around on the computer listening to music, and also because that’s a lie and Anthropologist Brain is having thinky thoughts but doesn’t mind listening to music while faffing around collating stuff, I’m going to do this twice: once with fanfic, and then once with my original short stories. I want to see how they compare.

Fanfic first!

Not Prime Time

Just a quick heads-up, for those of you who like this kind of thing: Not Prime Time, a fanfic exchange for medium-sized fandoms, is open for nominations until Friday. The exchange itself will give you about two months to write, starting around the end of April.

(Medium-sized fandom: too big for Yuletide, too small to be ENORMOUS.)

The timing of this coincides nicely with my revision, which is to say, I’ll be sending that off next Monday and then looking to kick back with something fluffy for a little while. So yes, I intend to participate.

This entry was also posted at http://swan-tower.dreamwidth.org/582639.html. Comment here or there.

the annual Yuletide guessing post

You have more chances than usual this year to guess what I wrote for Yuletide. If you guess right, you get, uh, bragging rights? And, I dunno — let’s say I’ll mail you a cover flat of A Natural History of Dragons if you want one, since I have a whole stack of them now, and no idea what else to do with them. 🙂

Clues behind the cut

Yuletide signups

Forgot to mention: Yuletide signups are now open. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, there’s a FAQ here that explains a lot. (And also this, but it’s kind of more “entertainingly helpy” than “actually helpful.”)

Signups will be open until the 28th. Further updates will be posted on (official) and (community); also, this post is worth keeping an eye on.

Yuletide is a lot of fun, and includes many things you might not class as “fanfic” in the normal way of things. I encourage people to check it out!

Yuletide nominations are open

For those who are interested, Yuletide nominations have begun.

Note that this is an optional part of the process, even if you want to do Yuletide; it’s only necessary if there’s something specific you know you want to request. (Or offer, since some people nominate based on what they’d be interested in writing.) If you do have something in that vein, though, nomination is the only way to be sure it will be available this year.

(If you’re not sure what Yuletide is in the first place, or want more info, there’s finally an up-to-date FAQ you can consult.)

The Avengers

I’m not usually much of a shipper (in the fanfic sense) . . . but I want ALL THE HAWKEYE/BLACK WIDOW FIC NOW.

Ahem. Apart from me loving those two and wanting them to get their own movie, I thought The Avengers was quite excellent. Once I have it on DVD, I may well sit down and try to pick apart just how the writers managed to balance their script. Superhero movies have foundered before on the “too many heroes/villains” problem, but this one did a remarkable job of giving each character a meaningful role, without letting the pacing bog down in side tangents. It’s helped, of course, by the fact that they’re operating off a whole slew of individual movies — but that doesn’t account for all of it, because you can do that and still have a terrible team-up (just look to comic books for proof). This one handled things very deftly, I thought, and I’d love to dig into how.

And now, I crash. Because I survived my first kobudo seminar today (though I’m not sure my feet did), and have earned my rest. 🙂

my taste in fanfic

I don’t read all that much fanfic. My fannish impulses don’t express themselves that way; I write individual stories because I come up with specific concepts, not because I have an ongoing engagement with the canon, or am linked into the social community of that fandom. Taken from the other direction, I generally only read things if a friend has recommended them, and a lot of what I read ends up not meaning a whole lot to me, because I lack the context or the interest to receive it properly.

But there are exceptions. There are fanfic stories I not only read, not only love, but remember for years afterward.

And, as I realized a while ago, they all have a common trait.

For a fanfic to really stick with me, it needs to be doing something extra, beyond just being fannish. (There’s nothing wrong with being fannish, mind you — it just isn’t what I read for.) Something intellectual, something critical, which can’t be done by writing original fiction, because that would lose the closeness entanglement of its commentary, and can’t be done by writing straight-up criticism, either, because that would lose . . . something harder to put my finger on. Stories that strike that balance make me absolutely giddy as a reader.

I’d like to share with you a few examples of what I mean, with explanatory notes. (But, uh, be warned — I guess the stories I like share two common traits. The thing I mentioned above, and the fact that they’re EPICALLY LONG. The two rather naturally go hand-in-hand.)

(more…)

Holmes and Watson need new punctuation

Saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows tonight, and had much great fun. Is it just me, or have we seen a tendency in the last 5-10 years for sequels to actually be better than the first movie of a series? If so, I attribute it to these being planned as series from the start, rather than the sequel being tacked on after the first one does well, and also on the way a second movie doesn’t have to spend all that tedious time setting up the characters and situation, but can just jump right into the story.

Anyway. That actually isn’t what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to talk about slash, and how utterly inadequate I find that word for describing the situation with Holmes and Watson in this movie.

(I’ll try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but I can’t promise about the comments.)

See, here’s the thing. To me — and I know people use the term in different ways, so this is just my own usage — slash is the process of taking the homoerotic subtext of a story and treating it as text. And one of the reasons I can’t call AGoS slashy is because it isn’t subtext. You simply cannot look at the interactions between Holmes and Watson in that film and think the story is not deliberately presenting you with two men who love each other very deeply, even if they can’t quite unbend enough to express that affection in direct terms.

The other reason I don’t want to call the film slashy is because, although you can find abundant bait there for imagining Holmes and Watson in a sexual relationship, I don’t read them that way. Partly this is because I get frustrated sometimes at how the slash lens tends to filter out all other possibilities for male emotional intimacy; we can’t let guys be friends or enemies even brothers without also sexualizing the relationship. That actually frustrates me sometimes, on par with my frustration over TV shows that like to use slashy subtext to engage the fans, but will never actually deliver on those wink-wink-nudge-nudge promises. (We can have slash, but almost never The Actual Gay.) Anyway, getting back to Holmes and Watson — sure, there’s certainly space there for reading it in that light. But I’m more interested in the story of two friends, because it’s a kind of friendship I feel I don’t see very often these days, where it isn’t all macho fellow-soldier camaraderie, but something with real vulnerability on both sides.

I don’t have a good term for what I see between them, in the first movie and especially the second. The closest I can come is a term my friends and I have used sometimes, “hetero lifemates,” for two straight people of the same sex whose friendship is of the lifelong kind. But it doesn’t quite hit the target I’m aiming at, maybe just because it’s unwieldy. Neither Holmes nor Watson would ever say it openly — let’s face it; they’re both late nineteenth-century men, and one of them is a rampaging narcissist — but they care as deeply about each other as either of them (okay, Watson) is capable of caring about anyone of the opposite sex. I feel like I need to resort to Greek here, except I don’t actually know which word I want. Agape? Philia? Eros? (Wikipedia claims that one doesn’t have to be sexual. Actual Hellenists, please weigh in.)

Whatever you call it, I’m fascinated by the way the movie embraces it, and does so without totally sidelining Mary Morstan. She doesn’t play a terribly prominent role, but they do make it clear that Watson isn’t marrying her just because it’s the sort of thing he’s expected to do. She and Watson have their thing, and he and Holmes have their thing, and it’s my sincere hope for all three characters that they manage to settle down into a dynamic that doesn’t force Watson to choose between them. Mary’s willingness to roll with various events suggests it may be possible.

I can’t refer to the guys as Holmes/Watson, though. They need new punctuation, something other than a slash. Any suggestions? 🙂 And, more to the point — what should we call this kind of thing, if it isn’t slash?

Yuuuuuuuuuletide

And we are done with anonymity; the authors have been revealed! I can now talk about what I did for the last month, after finishing novel revisions. 😀

findabair, did you peek or something?! 😉 Because you managed to throw a dart at a board 2598 fics big, and hit my assignment. That’s right, I matched with ladyanneboleyn on Cirque du Soleil’s show Alegría, and as a result, wrote “If You Have No Light.” It’s possibly one of the weirder things I’ve ever produced; while I adore Cirque, Alegría isn’t the one I’m the most familiar with, and so I had to force my brain to do a lot of high-speed composting of all the beautiful-but-strange things floating around the margins of that show. I really do like some of the touches I managed to put into that one, though, and I kind of hope Cirque gets requested again in the future. There really is so much hinted-at story in what they do, that deserved to be teased out more.

Next I wrote a treat, and here I’m cackling about who didn’t guess. Not one but two friends pinged me to say “YOU MUST READ THIS STORY IT’S AWESOME” . . . and linked me to my own fic! <chortle> The tale in question is “The Rest,” which arose out of reading a few prompts for The Sandbaggers, and then one for Casino Royale, which reminded me that SIS = MI6, and a crossover promptly fell out of my head. It probably loses something if you don’t know the first source (or the second, though that’s a much smaller percentage of the population — hi, maratai!), but I hope I managed to interest a few more people in that brilliant, brilliant show.

Then, ladies and gents, I had Angst. I even posted to the Yuletide community about it. I had this idea, see, but it was entirely possible somebody else had the same idea, and if that somebody else was the assigned writer I was going to feel like I’d copied their prom dress . . . and then five minutes after I posted that, the request came up for a pinch hit, and I just about sprained something grabbing it. 😀

Normally, of course, I’d say that two writers can produce very different results from the same idea. In this case, however, there was a lot less wiggle room than usual, because the idea in question was “The Tough Guide to Yuletide.” WOOOO, I managed to write one of this year’s hits! I sort of thought that might be the case, since Yuletide meta is one of the things people tend to like, but I did not anticipate the scale of my success. Prior to this, my most widely-read story was “Desert Rain,” my Elfquest pinch hit from last year. That got 223 hits over the course of the subsequent year. “The Tough Guide to Yuletide”? Had nearly 1400 before the author reveal. Holy cats, y’all.

The other funny thing here is that I had a panic attack of second-guessing: what if my recipient wasn’t all that interested in Yuletide meta? Just to cover my bases, I ran off and wrote a treat fic for the same person, also based on The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: “A Special Limited-Time Offer,” wherein I (lovingly . . . for the most part) mock the current wave of “gritty” epic fantasy. So yeah, two of this year’s three Tough Guide fics are my work, and both got a lot of love.

I also got a lot of love for — let’s see if LJ herniates on this text — “待龙纹身的女孩 (Dài lóng wénshēn de nǚhái) ,” a Mulan fic based on the “Twisted Disney Princesses” fan-art series. (If you can’t read that, it’s characters followed by “Dai long wenshen de nuhai” with a lot of diacritical marks, which is, according to the hippo who helped me, the official Mandarin translation for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”) The fact that I’m playing a Togashi monk in a Legend of the Five Rings game had nothing to do with my interest in that one, nosirree . . . Obvious title is obvious, but I figured I could be a little more creative, and avoid the odds of duplication with somebody else’s fic, if I took it out of English.

And finally, one final treat squeezed out at the last minute, because I’d seen the request weeks before and loved the concept enough that dammit, I wasn’t going to let the chance slip by. “A Devilish Exercise” was inspired by a prompt for a Hamlet crossover with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (and ended up waaaaay darker than the other fic written from the same thing). The bad part? I, er, mentioned in my notes on the fic that I had to stop the story where I did in order to prevent it from turning into a giant Hamlet AU . . . and then every comment I got urged me to go ahead and write the giant Hamlet AU.

The first chapter of that has just gone up.

I had a lot of success this Yuletide; not only did three of my fics get more hits in the last week than my most popular fic before did in a year, but I was lucky enough to see almost all of them recced on the Yuletide member community, several of them more than once. Some of that, I think, is more a matter of fandom than anything else; a lot more people are familiar with, say, Mulan — or Yuletide meta/the works of Diana Wynne Jones — than with the Gabriel Knight computer games. Still, pretty satisfying. 🙂

Almost forgot the Aurors deadline . . . .

Heh. Just realized today that in all the madness of writing six fics for Yuletide, I almost forgot about the challenge starlady38 and I are running. The page for that is here, if you missed it before but like the idea, and you don’t have to have participated in the prompt-generation phrase to write fics for any of the prompts there now. (You do, however, need an AO3 account; e-mail me if you want an invitation, which lets you bypass the queue.)

(Also, while I’m still on fanfic-related matters, I should mention that I won’t be replying to any guesses as to what I wrote for Yuletide until after the reveal. But I may offer some kind of prize if there are any correct guesses.)

Happy New Year, all! I’ll see you in 2012.