The 35th Precinct

Seven hundred words today.

Tumblr RP culture confounds me. Sometimes I have to remind myself that it's for fun and stop myself from sending them an ask that says, "But whyyyyyy would your character do or say that?" There's one person I follow, and I just... It's not that her characters are self-inserts; hell, that's practically my online pastime, and I'd be a giant hypocrite for knocking it, but GODDAMN, are they such blatant Sues. She's always the sexiest, smartest, and kindest person in the vicinity. She's sensual, gracious, and unfailingly polite. She always has the best plan and the mot juste, and oh, my God, it's incredibly grating to watch otherwise authoritative, characters defer to her. At one point, she orders both McCoy and Kirk around. And they meekly submit. LOL, no. I know it's irrational, but it's made me actively irritated at times. Thus far, I have managed to keep my fingers shut on the matter, but damn.

Yes, I'm a judgmental cunt, but after years of suppressing it in the name of civility. I've decided I no longer care. Maybe I should install Tumblr Savior and filter that crap out before I snap.

I found this on Tumblr. As far as I can tell, it's done by someone named 4aab. I don't really see a facial resemblance to either Bones, but the essence is still there.

I know the year isn't even half over, but it's been one of the best fannish periods I've had in a long, long time. Writing is fun again. I look forward to it instead of seeing it as penance, a bargain struck in return for my continued existence. Alternating stories keeps the characters fresh and setting a page count instead of a hard word count keeps me from getting pissy and resentful and feeling stifled by the ridiculous amount of time I spend chained to this keyboard.

No longer posting my fic to LJ has also helped. I don't have to come here in the days after posting a chapter to find dust and tumbleweeds and obsess over my declining skill and fading talent and wonder what's wrong with my fic, why aren't people reading, oh, my God, what if I'm a hack? I can post it to AO3 and FFN.net and get a few kudos and a smattering of comments and call it good. I don't have to sing for my fandom supper here anymore and worry about being interesting enough to keep readers. I tried that for years and got very little out of it except anxiety and frustration, so fuck it, I'm going to post words counts and dumb Youtube videos and Karl Urban pictures, and when the mood takes me, I might talk about two virgin priests breaking their vows and having hungry, clumsy sex or a lonely, touch-starved John Kennex falling in love with his gimpy neighbor but being too afraid to tell her so. Or about a Starfleet doctor having a forbidden love affair with his gimpy, time-traveling patient while James T. Kirk gives not a single fuck and surreptitiously roots him on or lovelorn elves reunited after thousands of years apart(yes, I'm still working on that). Or improbable, unapologetically iddy Dredd h/c. Fandom is not serious business; it's supposed to be fun, and I'm going to act like it.

One thousand five hundred and fifty-three words today.

I love(d) Almost Human, but damn, someone needs to breathe. I'm sure much of my sanguinity stems from the fact that a)Karl Urban was desperately homesick and b)the writing sucked festering monkey balls, but still.

She's sixty-four. I thought she was fourteen.

I posted the latest chapter of my Priestfic today. I was thrilled to get the biscuit, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a gigglefit over their priorities. Black Hat is a ruthless vampire who enjoys killing and terrorizing humans, and I've just spent several pages describing, in unflinching detail, how he's eaten the hearts of priests and killed the family whose cabin he now calls home, but who cares? It's so romantic that he loves Liese, his childhood friend and fellow priest. Uh. Hm. Wow. There's bones in the compost heap, but...true love. Ah, fandom.

Then I got this tidbit for my ST:AOS fic:

I absolutely love it! It's a great story :) I do think that the thoughts in italics are a bit long though, maybe you could shorten them up a bit? I hope she'll get better, it will result in them being equal I think :) Maybe Khan's blood will help? _ Well, to summarize things, I can't wait to find out this story continues :)

Because of course a cure is the only way they would ever be equal, right? The only thing to say to that is, "Thank you."

Irascible and out of sorts today. I finished a ficcing project the day before yesterday and am now trying to pick another, but with a mere five days before the deadline to start my contribution to the almosthumanbang, I don't want to commit. I suppose I could faff around with one of my two two drawerfics until then.

I need to stop reading the reading preferences thread on FFA; read them often enough, and I begin to get the idea that everything that makes fandom fun for me is bad and a blight upon its literary legitimacy. OCs? A scourge. Het romance? Boring and predictable. Tenderness, devotion, and loyalty? Soppy glurge. Angst? Self-indulgent projection. They go so far as to nitpick turns of phrase and piss and whine about tropes and genre conventions. According to them, everything ever written in fandom(or in profic, for that matter)is a revealing embarrassment. Their disdain is so lofty and palpable that an evil gnome in some small, fetid corner of my brains longs to peruse their fic and see just how many of them are blind hypocrites protesting entirely too much. More than a few, I'd wager, because I've been in fandom a long time, and it's hardly a hotbed of revolutionary thought. A hackneyed plot doesn't get fresh just because there are two dongs in it. Ninety percent of fic is derivative crap. I've written it. I'll probably keep writing it, too. It's familiar, but writing about love and pain and angst and love tested and tortured is fun. And if everyone is so tired of those moldering old canards, then why is fandom so full of the very things that it claims to hate?

Because fandom, like most of the people who comprise it, is full of shit.

Ron/Hermione Was a Mistake

LOL, BOOM. Potterdammerung reborn. Well, played Ms. Rowling.

Bored, so bored. Bored, bored, bored. I haven't written in two days. I want to, but as soon as I park myself in front of the keyboard, I can't be assed to do anything but watch insipid Youtube videos. What was once so effortless and fun now seems like such a grinding slog. I don't know when or why that happened, but it did. Fandom isn't as fun as I remember it. Maybe it's because LJ and its attendant culture of conversation and feedback and mutual squee tempered by the occasional vigorous wank is dying. It is dying; if you doubt, you have merely to peruse fail_fandomanon to see the alarming number of fans who either claim that those who produce in fandom owe those who consume fannish output with no expectation of feedback, gratitude, or meaningful interaction, or who excuse their entitlement or laziness with pathetic, mewling cries of, "I didn't thank my fest/exchange writers because I have anxiety issues, oh, noes!" Bullshit. You didn't thank them because you didn't think you had to, and if your anxiety is so crippling that you cannot type "Thank you," into the comment box, then you shouldn't be signing up for a fest where feedback is the expected fannish currency and the established social norm. "But I wanted to participate!" you say? Fine. Then buck up and say the bare minimum. I'm sure your author wanted that feedback, too, but they got the shaft when you weenied out because typing was soooo hard. And who's to say that they didn't swallow a huge lump of insecurity and angst when they wrote you that fic? Why is your laziness anxiety about leaving feedback more important than their fear of getting it wrong or disappointing their recipient? You got what you wanted out of the deal the minute your fic was posted. So why is it too much to ask that you nut up and say thank you like a decent human being?

In case you haven't noticed, I'm tired of people co-opting real illnesses as an excuse to be lazy, ungrateful assholes. And no, I don't have a dog in this fight. The last exchange I did was six or seven years ago. I signed up for a second, defaulted, and never signed up for another because it wasn't fair to my potential recipient that I couldn't get myself together and honor my commitment. I know how much it sucks to shout into the wind, and I don't want to be that asshole for anyone else.

Maybe I should just bite the bullet and get a Tumblr, but I have the sneaking suspicion that I would be drummed out within a week for writing something problematic or saying something -ist.

We're enjoying a lazy weekend at home. I've been eating Tyson buffalo wings. They're no replacement for the real thing, but they'll satisfy the hankering without the need for pants, so...

Maybe I'm just a bitter old fogey fan, but fannish entitlement is out of control. When I first got into fandom fifteen years ago, it wasn't about seeing your shipping fantasies realized onscreen or bending the show to your whims. We absolutely rooted for our pet pairings and plot developments, and the more vociferous among us occasionally scrummed amongst ourselves with pitch and pitchforks and bilious vituperation, but we were, by and large content, to wish and dream and play in our sandbox.

But now, good Lord. Thanks to Twitter, fans can mount ridiculous, quixotic campaigns for their pet theory and harangue showrunners and actors about developments they dislike. They can publicly show their unbecoming asses when their demands for A and B to boff aren't met or send death threats to actress "in the way" of their hottie OTP and accusations of queer-baiting and homophobia to every showrunner whose cast isn't 100% enthusiastically gay and repulsed by the treacherous, disgusting threat of snatch. Fans think that because their wishes can now be heard by TPTB, they are entitled to see them fulfilled. It's human nature, but it's also unsettling when it reaches SPN and Sherlock proportions of desire and delusion. Sending death threats to partners and wives? Hurling abuse at cast members because they're purportedly cockblocking the OTP that exists solely in your head? Telling fans who disagree with you that they're worthless, homophobic pieces of shit who should kill themselves? There is wistful fantasy to share with like-minded people, and then there's dangerous mob mentality, and fandom has clearly veered toward the latter, gleefully and unapologetically.

I know what it's like to want to see someone who looks like you in mainstream media. The only faces that look like mine are dying in hospital beds with tragic nobility or used as props to teach the people who matter uplifting life lessons. We aren't seen having a one-night stand with the hunky protagonist or working as successful lawyers, tech specialists, or businesspeople. Sometimes, we get to play the asshole, but we're always defeated by the able protagonist and his mighty normal bod, and our motives are almost always linked to our gimpy bitterness.

So, yeah, I've had to engage in a lot of fantasy in my time. I knew TPTB on CSI:NY were never going to pair Flack with anyone who didn't look like a cover girl, so I didn't bother bleating at them about it in fits of righteous and utterly futile indignation. Instead, I sighed and set up my own sandbox and played the way I wanted to in relative anonymity. By the same token, I know that Almost Human isn't going to pair Kennex with a limpy lady(in fact, they're painfully transparent about pushing him into bed with Det. Stahl, who is pretty but otherwise inconsequential to the plot), so I'm not going to make an ass of myself hectoring J.J. Abrams or Karl Urban about it on Twitter. It's rude and ineffectual, and I'm sure neither one of them gives a damn what I want. It's their sandbox and their vision, derivative as it is, and no one is making me watch.

If I want to see Kennex tapping that gimpy ass, then I'm going to have to write it myself. It's a bummer, but it's not the end of the world or a hill I'm willing to die on.

Fandom has been the land of Everything Else since it started, and that's what it should be, not the land of My Way or Else. The fourth wall can't be rebuilt, but the people behind it can damn well conduct themselves with a little dignity.

I was bored last night, so I reread Danse Macabre, an HP/CSI:NY fic I wrote in 2007. It still holds up for me, although I did spot a few typos. It's been a year since I last visited that world. It's high time for a return. Those characters are fun to play with, and now that CSI:NY is a closed canon, I'll have near-infinite leeway. At the very least, Rebecca and Seamus need to reunite for a wizardly adventure and friendship escapade between war buddies and damaged people with their individual issues. Maybe Seamus can ask her to accompany him on a vengeance quest to snuff Walden Macnair.

According to a comment I made about that fic, it clocked in at 111,000+ words in seventeen chapters. Well, no wonder I have so many unfinished WIPs. Laziness is the primary reason, no doubt, but when a "short" fic exceeds the length of three novels, it's easy to see why creative fatigue might set in. When current fannish trends count anything over 10,000 words as long and I'm routinely writing individual chapters that length or longer, it's simple math that my works are going to take longer and see less return on creative investment that a fic that is written in a week by folks with nimbler fingers and a narrative filter.

I've been working on Sprache for nearly two years. I have no idea of its word count, but I'm sure it's 100,000+ It is still not finished. To date, I have earned maybe twenty-five reviews. It's been a long, slow grind.

I don't know what I'm trying to say. That it's lonely and occasionally boring. I'm a fandom tortoise, plodding gamely along at the pace of a comatose glacier. I wish I were faster so that I could devote time to the million fic ideas in my head and display them in time to participate in the squeeful camaraderie. By the time I finish my Trek idea, the nu!Trek verse will be inert again, and by the time I finish my Haldirfic, even Legolas will be so many cobwebbed bones in the corner. Writing daily whether I want to or not would help, but it wouldn't solve the problem entirely because 1,000 words is my absolutely daily limit, and if an "average" fic runs 100,000 words in my world and the sweeping epics are longer, it would still take me four months to produce a complete work.

TL;DR: Waaaah, fandom, I can't keep up with youuuuuu.

For the curious, Summon the Lambs to Slaughter remains my longest work at 53 chapters and 450,000+ words. It wasn't yet half-finished at the time canon torpedoed it.