write like you need it to survive

welp

2012-04-20T00:27:49Z

There is something kind of fantastically meta-fannish about sitting down to watch real Blackhawks who I have read porn about while wearing my Kowalski #67 Blackhawks jersey.

Duncs/Seabs recs? I already read the werewolf one and the high school AU.

Or Jeff Skinner/Eric Staal? But I think I've read possibly literally all of those that there are. Including the lapdancing.

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30 questions fic meme, day 18: ...

2011-08-18T15:37:37Z

18 – Where do you get the most inspiration for your fics (aka "bunnies") from?

Er. Seriously, we're doing the "where do your ideas come from?" question? Who wrote this meme?

Ahem. Anyway. I get bunnies from everywhere. The whole long Aral/Jole saga came from me tin-hatting Aral and Jole in canon and then sitting down and trying to work out how the hell that would work. The Generation Kill wolf-verse came, as far as I can reconstruct, from me trying to figure out how to take the GK guys and turn everything about them up to eleven--raise the already-high stakes, make their culture even weirder and more insular and intense and more serious about warrior spirits. I have a bunny that comes from listening to a particular song over and over and wanting to shove Brad and Nate inside it. I have a bunny that comes from me talking to Iulia and saying "I don't think anyone's written X. Oh, hey...." (The maximum case of that is Hawks and Hands, which was spawned, in all its enormity, from someone assuring me that they didn't mind how hockey kept cropping up in my Due South stories and my replying, "It's not going to be funny anymore when I write a whole AU where they're hockey players. Oh, hey....") I have a bunny that came from reading someone's unanswered request for recs of fic featuring a specific scenario, which, in retrospect, I probably misinterpreted enough that she wouldn't want to read the story I want to write.

Mostly my bunnies come from the fact that when I'm into a fandom, it's right there at the front of my brain, and everything I encounter bumps up against it. Sometimes it throws off sparks. Sometimes the sparks catch.

( All 30 questions under the cut. )

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30 questions fic meme, day 8: you keep using that word.

2011-08-04T14:45:18Z

8 – Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

FIRSTLY. YOU CAN STUFF YOUR MARY SUE WHERE THE SUN DON'T SHINE, a thoughtful and informative discussion of what a Mary Sue is and is not and how the term is used to police and punish prominent female characters for being too, you know, female. And prominent.

Ahem.

Do I write original characters? Yes. But I don't think I've ever written one in a lead/romantic role (sorry, Hector and Alyosha, I will figure out how to write that story about you EVENTUALLY, I swear) because I tend to be busy smooshing together the guys I like best from canon. Or exploring their individual manpain in some fashion.

(That said I have written some near-OCs, like Arkady Jole and many of the ladies involved in the Stargate SG-1 Bechdel Test Fix-Its, characters so minor I have to make up part or all of their names. But since I'm extrapolating all these characters from their actual appearances in canon, because of their actual appearances in canon, I choose to assume that's a different thing.)

Anyway: when I write original characters it tends to be because I have some ecological niche in the story that I can't fill from canon. This includes kids (Ianto Jones, Junior; Ada O'Neill; David Fraser; many, many children who never saw the light of day in stories never written or yet to be written), villains (Williamson in Missing Persons), and other assorted secondary characters (the hockey player Ray has sex with in Hawks & Hands, Jole's Tonton and Tatie, extra Vorkosigan armsmen, and so on).

I worry a lot about whether the kids I write will turn into Mary Sues, in the sense of being excessively perfect and taking over a story that's really supposed to be about canon characters. For them, I try to remember all of the least-convenient behaviors of kids I know, and also to make sure that every scene with a kid is really serving to show something about the adults in the scene and moving the plot along. Also, no baby talk ever. Luckily I keep writing children who can be plausibly argued, from the parenting they have received, to be very mature and articulate for their ages.

On the other hand, when it comes to adult OCs, I will cop to making them as perfect as possible in whatever niche they're filling. I regularly figured out what Williamson would say or do in a given scene by just thinking up the most perfectly creepy thing he could do and then going with that. He was a Mary Sue of creepiness and villainy.

Oh, and for the record Bo is a total Mary Sue. She's an original female character with an uncanny bond to the central male character(s), who adore her beyond reason. She warps the entire universe around herself. Only horrible characters hate her or are jealous of her. All will love her and despair. And so on.

( All 30 questions under the cut. )

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30 questions fic meme, day 5: at least it's a short answer.

2011-07-31T23:30:44Z

5 – If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?

I haven't. In fact I'm honestly not even sure what that would be like or how it would work. Can anybody who has had that happen tell me about it? Is it as common an experience as the phrasing of this question seems to imply?

I mean, I have a short attention span and am what you might call a fannish butterfly; I am no stranger to being halfway through a story and becoming quite fascinated by some other character who is not the character I'm writing about right now. Usually that just means I want to go write some other story about that character, though, not introduce said character into the story I'm presently writing.

A few times I have realized a character in a story I was writing was more important than I originally thought he was (for example, that Rodney McKay was the secret hero of a story that wasn't about Rodney McKay at all) and in that case I attempted to make sure that the story supplied a satisfying point of closure regarding that character, so that people who recognized his importance didn't feel he'd fallen into a plot hole and disappeared. But the story still wasn't about him.

( 30 questions under the cut. )

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30 questions fic meme, day 4: no disrespect to the spirits of the arts

2011-07-30T15:26:15Z

4 – Do you have a "muse" character, that speaks to you more than others, or that tries to push their way in, even when the fic isn't about them? Who are they, and why did that character became your muse?

This is the question that actually made me want to do this meme, because it irritated me so much that I couldn't stop thinking about it. *g*

Short answer, with apologies to everyone I adore who uses this metaphor (or who actually has a supernatural consort who inspires their work, in which case, dude, that is kind of awesome and yet scary): No. The word "muse" makes my eye twitch.

( Longer answer, which is that that's not quite the way my story-generating process works, and I am curious to hear from people whose story-generating process works differently. )

( All 30 questions under the cut. )

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A few things

2011-05-21T20:33:17Z

Sooooo I may have mentioned I am posting a story for stargate_summer this year. I've got my posting date-range--I'm going the last week of June. I'm not sure of the exact date because it includes the weekend of a certain bridal shower for which I will possibly be the only member of the bridal party in attendance apart from the actual, you know, bride. And groom. Probably. So there are some logistics to sort out there.

Anyway! The story is up to 58,000 words at this point in the beta process and I still have ... many more things to add and fix, and I have index cards and an outline and everything, so we all know what that means, right? Yes. Cat-waxing.

So! Here's Stargate SG-1, Season Four on the characterscount wiki, devoted to tracking Bechdel test passes/fails and in general the representation of women and people of color in TV shows and movies. There's not a lot there because you have to be a special kind of obsessive to do this much counting, but anyone can add more! If you're interested in this sort of thing, you can hook up with other people who are at characterscount.

Season 4, as it turned out, was even more dismal than every other season preceding it for representation of people of color--it included twelve episodes (more than half!) where Teal'c was the only person of color, and we got to the twelfth episode of the season before two people of color spoke to each other at all. So, uh. *facepalm* Oh, show. What.

And now, off to find something else to do that is not working on my bigbang but also not totally giving in and allowing Generation Kill to take over my brain as it has been trying valiantly to do for the last ten days or so. /o\

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Advanced-Level Cat-Waxing: Why Am I Even Doing This, This Is A Terrible Idea.

2011-02-19T05:23:58Z

So I was reading T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets today, like I do, because I had finished the book I was reading and didn't want to write on my lunch hour. And so the end of "East Coker" particularly struck me, like it does.

( Rambling thoughts about T. S. Eliot and writing fic versus writing original fiction with cameo appearance by my 592nd Existential Crisis As A Writer. )

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It is really too bad I deleted the LJ in which I would have documented this.

2011-01-21T04:26:17Z

So around January 2002 I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring with thelionforreal, who was at that point possibly already a part of the Popslash=>Lotrips migration. I had already been resisting seeing the movie for a month or more because--I realize this will not make any sense to anyone, okay, but there it is--I had come across a Theban Band manip of Aragorn and Boromir, and I had made it my desktop wallpaper, and Boromir was smiling a particularly happy smile, and I knew that he was going to die in the movie, and I knew that he would not smile that smile or be that happy, and I did not want to see it.

But eventually I went to see the movie, and sure enough he died, and I started crying--I started sobbing, and I did not stop for half an hour. If you are familiar with the movie, you will realize that this took me through the rest of the movie, the credits, and the three-block walk home from the movie theater. I still feel kind of bad about subjecting Missi to that; I'm sure she was even more baffled by it than I was.

Ever since then, I feel a little uncertain of what I mean, or what anyone else understands me to mean, when I say a book or a movie or something made me cry. Last night I finished reading The Persian Boy, and Alexander's death (this is even less of a spoiler than Boromir's death, okay) made tears drip from my eyes, and instead of just saying to anyone "The Persian Boy made me cry!" I found myself wondering what it meant when I said that and whether I would be somehow deceiving someone because I was not, for instance, prostrated with grief for at least half an hour.

So! A poll. (On Dreamwidth only. But you can be a part of this very important scientific undertaking with an OpenID login!)

( A poll about crying over stuff. )

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I feel like this post is either a statement of the blindingly obvious or bound to offend everyone.

2010-06-02T22:59:16Z

Maybe both!

Every so often I expound my Theory of How/Why (Sibling) Incest Pairings Are the New Slash to someone. It's something I more or less worked out while writing Missing Persons, particularly the stage of writing MP during which I, uh, stopped shipping Don and Charlie and started wishing they would date other people because that would be so much healthier for them.

/o\

So I have always had a somewhat sheepish and awkward relationship to my theory, and at this point I feel vaguely like incest ships are either totally routine or slightly passe, and so the theory is of no interest to anyone. Plus, I don't think I've ever explained the theory to anyone who did not seem to find it self-evident, so I began to assume that it was, in fact, self-evident for everyone.

But it occurs to me that a) that is probably the echo chamber of my particular end of fandom in action and b) regardless of its currency I have never written my theory down, and explaining it from scratch every time it comes up somewhere on the internets is sort of inefficient.

So, here. I will write it down. Probably at some length. With a long digression on what old slash things incest ships are the new version of. Please feel entirely free not to click.

( My Theory of How/Why (Sibling) Incest Pairings Are the New Slash. )

This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/557419.html.

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book review, of sorts, again.

2009-09-21T01:00:17Z

Sometime in the last five years, in reference to some discussion of the way fanfic and slash are devalued and ghettoized and marginalized and dismissed by everyone but us--and sometimes even by us--someone somewhere mentioned Joanna Russ's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing.

This weekend, I finally got around to reading it. I had already had the main points summarized by that fanperson who recced it, and then by the cover, which reads:

She didn't write it. But if it's clear she did the deed... She wrote it, but she shouldn't have. (It's political, sexual, masculine, feminist.) She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. (The bedroom, the kitchen, her family. Other women!) She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it. ("Jane Eyre. Poor dear, that's all she ever...") She wrote it, but she isn't really an artist, and it isn't really art. (It's a thriller, a romance, a children's book. It's sci fi!) She wrote it, but she had help. (Robert Browning. Bramwell Bronte. Her own "masculine side".) She wrote it, but she's an anomaly. (Woolf. With Leonard's help...) She wrote it BUT...

So it was a quick but still difficult, dizzying read. The book was, I believe, originally written in 1979, making it the disheartening experience of the generation before mine. I was intensely conscious as I read it of my gratitude for the existence of Lois McMaster Bujold, who wrote the books I wanted to read and received critical acclaim for it, and never allowed me to imagine that I could not go right ahead and do the same (and Dorothy Sayers and Georgette Heyer and the rest, for inspiring her). Still, I came away with a sizable list of women's writing to go out and find and read, post haste.

And also, of course, I was reading it with an eye to fic, and slash, and our rightful place as a massive literary movement. I was just as conscious of being thankful that I had come into fandom at a time when I never had to do anything for the first time, when fans who came before me had already invented our genres and vocabulary and fannish infrastructure, so I didn't have to wander around in the outer darkness wondering about this funny feeling I got whenever Jack and Daniel or Jim and Blair looked at each other like that. I could dive right in and write and label my story and send it out to the mailing list devoted to its pairing--I had all the tools, models to follow, and a ready-made audience.

But, of course, it was just fanfic.

So here's no less an authority than Jane Austen (as quoted by Russ, 101) addressing, in Northanger Abbey, the stigma that attached to her community of writers and their chosen form of expression: the novel.

Let us not desert one another; we are an injured body. Although our productions have afforded more extensive and unaffected pleasure than any other literary corporation in this world, no species of composition has been so much decried. ... There seems almost a general wish of decrying the capacity and under-valuing the labour of the novelist, and of slighting the performances which have only genius, wit, and taste to recommend them.

Russ writes, "Jane Austen ... worked (as some critics tend to forget) in a genre that had been dominated by women for a century and one that was looked down upon as trash, a position that may have given her considerable artistic freedom." (100)

So I thought of the Five Things story, and flashfic and drabbles and those challenge stories where you have to include the word eggbeater and a quotation of the prompter's choosing, and Written by the Victors and the Shoebox Project and every other wildly experimental way we've done this thing we do.

Later, discussing the forms in which the Europe's earliest literate women wrote, Russ mentions that "women always write in the vernacular. Not strictly true, and yet it explains a lot. It certainly explains letters and diaries. ... It explains why so many wrote ghost stories in the nineteenth century and still write them." (128-129)

And, it occurred to me, that's what we're doing. We're writing in the vernacular. If there is a ubiquitous, disposable, disreputable form of writing today, it's internet porn. And here we are, making it (to say nothing of the equally-ubiquitous television show, comic, movie, or children's book) our own.

And this is a real thing we are doing, and our work is real work, and our writing is real writing, and we are really here together doing this, and I am glad.

This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/527925.html.

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To warn or not to warn: is this actually a question?

2009-06-24T15:05:41Z

The nice thing that sometimes happens, if you spend enough time ranting privately and fuming about a thing, is that someone else comes along who articulates just how you feel about something. (It helps if you have spent some time ranting to each other, to get the match-up quite precise.)

So, behold, fairestcat has said her piece, and I can just point in that direction and say I AGREE as loudly as if I were a drunk hockey fan (my longing for a refrigerated arena and an eight-dollar beer being neither here not there at the moment).

I AGREE: I Don't Care About Blair Sandberg's Hair.

airgiodslv also raised points that made me nod vigorously: Community.

Although I have to admit, at some level, ignoring common courtesy and decency and basic concern for the welfare of other people, my view on warnings boils down to this, with apologies to C.S. Lewis:

A story about a triggery topic which can only be enjoyed without a trigger warning is not a good story to begin with.

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Demographics of Stargate SG-1, season three.

2009-05-13T17:55:37Z

Stats are available at the SG-1 Season 3 page on the Characters Count Wiki, or under the cut:
( Chart, under the cut! )

Takeaways for Season 3:

One statistic improved: Bechdel Test passes continued to increase, from 9/21 in S1 to 11/22 in S2 to 12/22 in S3.

One statistic stayed the same: race-Bechdel Test passes, at 5/22.

Everything else got worse. Everything. Four episodes in which Sam is the only woman, EIGHT in which Teal'c is the only person of color, counts and percentages down across the board.

(And, with the introduction of the Replicators as villains--and Asgard as allies in the fight against them--we begin the move away from the Goa'uld and Jaffa, who represent a considerable proportion of the women and people of color in some episodes, replacing them with mechanical spiders and race- and gender-neutral alien things. For whatever that's worth.

Oh, show. What the hell.)

Now, perhaps you are thinking, well, that sucks, what is there to be done about it? Do what fans always do! Join a comm!

At LiveJournal, there is the newly formed passingbechdel community, for all your Bechdel Test fixit-fic needs--it's open to all fandoms, and welcomes fic that brings characters of color together, as well as fic that highlights women.

At Dreamwidth, there is the also newly formed characterscount community, affiliated with the Characters Count Wiki, for discussion and coordination of counting projects like this one--if you've embarked on a crazy counting project, or if you would like to organize a group of people to cooperate on one, or if you just want to kibbitz, it's the place to go.

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Demographics of Stargate SG-1, season two.

2009-04-21T14:51:15Z

Continuing the counting project (follow that link for explanation and methodology), my chart for The Demographics of Stargate SG-1, Season Two is up at the Characters Count wiki. (Semi-relatedly, there is also a chart up for Merlin! such_heights even tracked deaths, which totally defeated me for SG-1.)

I switched from using caps to distinguish levels of Bechdel fail to using numbers--Fail 1 fails on the first criterion ("There are two..."), Fail 2 fails on the second ("And they talk to each other"), Fail 3 fails on the third ("About something other than..."). Fail 3's actually seem to be relatively rare.

Takeaways from the Season 2 results:

Representation of women improved somewhat. Season 1 had three episodes with only one woman; Season 2 had none. Season 1 had 9/21 Bechdel Test passes, Season 2 had 11/22. Median percentage of women among the speaking characters increased from 25% to 28.6%. Still nothing to write home about, but moving in the right direction, however slightly.

Representation of people of color was sort of a mixed bag. Episodes with Teal'c as the only person of color declined from seven to four, but race-Bechdel test passes also declined, from eight to five. (That was the stat I couldn't get over, when I put the chart together. In all of season two, there were FIVE EPISODES in which two characters of color spoke to one another. FIVE!) Median percentage of characters of color did move upward a little, though, from 18.1% to 20.7%.

"Family" was the episode that passed best on the Bechdel and Race-Bechdel tests (although the Bechdel Test pass was iffy, which, given what I am willing to accept as a pass from this show, is pretty sad).

"Gamekeeper" gets special mention for having 46.7% female characters in speaking roles (7 out of 15) and still utterly failing to have any two women speak to each other directly.

And now, onward into Season 3... (Guys, I am kind of excited about Season 3 so far, I am just saying. And now that I've said that I will doubtless find myself watching something really wretched tonight.)

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