Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Friday Five on a Monday Afternoon

Late-night addendum added to question 4.

1. A pairing that you enjoy reading but will never write, and why.

Chakotay/Torres, because it seems so right yet I don't know enough about the first three seasons of Voyager to write in that time period. That seems like their time, to me.

2. The pairing that you think has spurred the most really awful fan fiction.

I'm going to have to go with the majority here - Janeway/Chakotay has the worst, and the best, fan fiction out there, but only because it has the lion's share of the Voyager pairing market. Statistically speaking, it should get all the outliers.

3. A pairing that you just don't get.

Doc/7. People keep telling me it's a pairing, with fans, but all I've ever seen of it is a few one-off fics. [See comments.]

4. A pairing that you think is difficult to write believably, and an example of it done well.

Picard/Troi of C&C fame goes without saying, but for Voyager I'd have to say Janeway/Paris is a tough one to write believably, and nothing really comes to mind that was believable. I'll have to root around for one when I get home.

[Monday night addendum] I looked through my notes for a couple of J/P contest-type situations, and yes, no J/P fic has ever really blown me away. Thanks for the recommendations (see comments), but I still haven't found that J/P fic in the sky. I don't know that angst done well is necessarily J/P done well - it seems to me that the main J/P challenge is keeping them together, not setting them up for a life-scarring fling (as is so often done to the poor 'fleet brats). So I will continue to search for the perfect J/P.

This year's J/P contest (2002 TomKat Awards) is open for submissions until December 15th, and is a blind contest. I entered two losing stories in last year's not-so-anonymous contest, neither of which was the perfect J/P fic. I think I'll enter again. I could even work in some C/7 and Die J/C Die themes, though I think I did that last year. I suppose I could write that mass-pregnancy fic that I never got around to back when I was 'shippy...

5. A pairing that you have written or have thought about writing, despite your own surprise that you would consider it.

That would have to be Garak/7. It never would have happened without Seema's nefarious incitement.

ParaBlog

Check out We Read Crap So You Don't Have To, a blog of fic rec announcements. I don't know that a one-blogger show can keep up with that long list of rec sites, but man is it trippy to look at. Just wait a minute before you click anything.

I think I forgot to announce the zendom update, again. Read up on how the fans fan.

Show Don't Tell

I've always been unduly fond of editing, so I'm enjoying revising Colony. I'm not sure I'll be quite as excited when I get to those twenty or thirty missing scenes, but so far, so good. I revised the first section (out of a former six and current seven), and though the additions were a great improvement, I keep having ambitious ideas about theme and supporting characters that will someday mean working back through the beginning again.

I confess, I had one of those Really Bad Structural Ideas, which was to drop every single name in Roll Call somewhere along the way. I'd only have to drop an average of one name a scene. So far I'm breaking even, I think. I'm also keeping close track of the sexes of all my characters - when your first name is Crewman or, alternately, Tazise, it's hard to remember after a while.

Things will be simpler once I pair a few characters off. Then, if you know one, you know the other one is the opposite gender. It's not so much that they're heterosexual as that they're only interested in reproduction. Babies! Everywhere! But it's not babyfic - babyfic doesn't involve anything like the massive daycare organization I'm planning.

It's not all about the Original Aliens, either - I'm enjoying writing the Voyager characters again, as well. I'm especially looking forward to making trouble for Tuvok, both on the "Resolutions"/"Galileo 7" level of logical Vulcan trying to command illogical Humans, and on the "UMZ" level of...some kind of life-threatening of Tuvok. That subplot is to be filled in later.

I'm taking things one scene at a time. I find that I can write from a plan - most of my plans for Colony involve taking a few sentences of tell, moving them the appropriate spot (usually earlier in the story), and turning them into a full scene of show. I had my doubts when I started, but it's working pretty well so far.

I'm hoping to lure the muse back in time to threaten Tuvok's life. Maybe she'll kill Harry while she's at it - Kimicide is all the rage. At the very least, I need to pair him off with an OC and get him in trouble, a la...well, every K/f episode. Maybe I'll let him have the first baby. I'm branching off from "Shattered", so he could even beat P/T to the Lamaze class if he tries hard enough.

I didn't realize, when VS7.5 did it that "Shattered" was such a natural break-point. I was going to go all the way back to "Drive", but nothing of the real Season 7 weirdness happened until "Lineage". I may be stocking up on the babies, but there will be no Klingon messiah child. Not again. The line must be drawn *here*. This far, *no* farther.

Hoppy legs and twitchy little noses...

Thanks to Sara, all the sad, lonely plot bunnies of the world have a place to hang out and multiply. Hop on over to The Breeding Ground and watch the fic fly!

Canon and Communication II

Writing fanfic is like speaking a language. The vocabulary of that language depends on the style of fanfic - for some, the language is the events of canon as broadcast. For others, the language is the infectious ideas of fanon. Canon people may denigrate a fanon story in which the characters are stunningly out of character. Fanon people more often express a sentiment of boredom when reading canon stories in which none of their own familiar chords are struck.

To make a random analogy, canon fanfic is like historical fiction, where the challenge is to fit a story to the historical record. (An AU would be like alternate history.) Fanon fanfic is more like romance novels, in which the overall plot and emotions are rather standardized, and the challenge is to do that popular turbolift theme in your own personal way.

Neither canon nor fanon is much like the mystery novel; that much concentrated, mandatory plotting would be hard to reconcile with the language of either fanon or canon. Science fiction and fantasy depend upon writing a new language (for the new world) and then convincing the reader that she speaks it. That's the opposite of fanfic, even for sci-fi shows.

I meant to blog about communication in fandom more generally, so let me see if I can connect the dots. The language of fanfic is similar to the language of general fannishness - a canon writer knows the nits as well as any nitpicker would. A fanon writer knows the classic episodes for her preferred fanon pairing, even if only second-hand. A complaint about the show itself leads to a fanfix.

There is no question of civility in fanfic itself - you can snark to your heart's content, and as long as you phrase it as a story, there is no arguing with you directly. Someone might write her own counter-story, but such exchanges are rarely violent. There's quite a lag in writing stories, and there's a bigger one in reading them - if you read them at all. What J/C fan would read our C/7 fic to find out what we're saying about J/C? There's a dialogue going on there, but it's between the writer and the fanon, not the writer and the reader.

There's no question of civility when talking about the show, either, because such discussions are always a bloody (and I mean that literally, not Britishly) religious war. Kill them all and let Roddenberry sort them out. Just walk into #jetc and start talking about C/7 and you'll see what I mean. Or read the TrekBBS on any topic. These are topics on which we agree to disagree violently, repeatedly and irreconcilably.

Sometimes, we're not writing fanfic and we're not talking about the show. Those are the meta and the diva times - talking about fandom itself, or talking about our lovely selves. Meta and diva cause the most controversy (as opposed to formalized name-calling). Is someone else's ideas about, say, the Muse a legitimate meta discussion or a claim to divine standing? Is an email about your important diva doings, when crossposted to a generous smattering of lists, just helpful information or annoying mass-marketing? Is meta interesting at all? Is snark cruel? Does merely having opinions turn you into a diva?

At the meta-diva level, we've lost our common tongue of Trek or Vamp or whatever it might be, and we're thrown back on our native languages. Where I come from, sarcasm is never a faux pas, but self-promotion always is. If someone is clearly stupider than you are, you don't point that out. You never, ever, ever condescend. It's fine to go slumming but you can't rub his face in it, and you're not going to get any sympathy from your friends after the breakup.

But I digress. The point is that there's a grammar. Some of the rules are national, some local, some class-based, some individual. It's not a matter of print coming across differently than voice would - the sentences themselves mean different things in different languages.

The Basic English of fandom is always to say thank you for feedback and never to voice a negative opinion. It's a starveling tongue, but I doubt there's a bigger intersection between the various languages out there. As I get older, I find that not much can be conveyed in Basic Fannish, and not much of what can interests me. I'd rather talk to someone who speaks my language than dance around someone who doesn't.

Disclaimer for speakers of foreign languages: Note that I never said canon was better than fanon, or that New Englanders were better than midwesterners. Nothing I said means that canon is better than fanon or that I am better than you, not even if you would have meant exactly that if you had written the above.

Canon and Communication

I've been accused of writing "canon" and I don't object to the label, partly because I don't believe canon and fanon are mutually exclusive. The way I see it, writing canon means writing that has a significant relationship to the show as broadcast - speaking a language that anyone who watched the show could understand. Writing fanon is writing with an eye to the traditions of fanfic. How deeply you delve into canon or fanon determines how "canon" or "fanon" the resulting story is.

They're not quite symmetric, because fanon is both easy to ignore, easy to stumble into, and easy to create. Fanon spreads like a virus - you pick it up somewhere, without quite remembering which fic it came from, and incorporate it into your fic, spreading it to others. Canon is hard to ignore, hard to get right, and impossible to create unless you're TPTB.

Writing fanfic is always a dialogue with canon - sometimes it's shouting "you should have been this way," and sometimes it's whispering, "you really were this way." The quality of the fanfic is determined by how convincing the argument is - people who prefer to shout down their opponents like their fanfic over-the-top. Readers with a more hermeneutic approach will prefer a convincing moment of characterization or fanfix to an arbitrary chapter of familiar but unfounded fanon plot.

To give a specific example: a fanon story tells you that Janeway finally saw the light and told Chakotay how she really felt about him. A canon story tells you how Janeway saw the light. There's no good reason one story can't do both, though there are bad reasons. Fanon-leaning people tend to be angry at canon and refuse to deal with certain events, or deal with them in a hasty, out-of-character way. Canon-leaning people tend to shy away from any consequences, as if TPTB themselves were leaning over their computers insisting that the characters be returned unaltered for next week's episode. Fluff worn on your sleeve or angst hidden in your heart...

I really was going to write about communication in fandom, but it's late so that will have to wait until tomorrow.

Today in Colony

I distributed the couplets somewhat evenly through Colony, but I'm still rather short on subplot scenes. I was thinking of dragging in the Borg - I have my own bad guys who could, presumably, make a subplot of trouble, but the Borg are so much more accessible. Tuvok plus Borg post-UMZ seems like a promising combination.

Throwing the Borg at every minor lull in my writing is the sort of thing TPTB would do. We're supposed to be above all that, but I need to do something about the whole issue of dropping a moon into a sun. It takes too long, and my aliens have to be pretty darn dense to fall for that one.

If not the Borg, maybe an ion storm... This is why I don't write VOY anymore - I used up all my good plot ideas.

Fluff it Up

As usual, I'm late linking the latest zendom article, on lovin' fluff.

Jungle Kitty said something on-list about fanfic shortcuts that I just can't get out of my mind. She was kind enough to quote a whole article: It's Like a Movie, But It's Not, which otherwise you have to log into the NYTimes page to read. In it, Neal Gabler claims that movies today skip all the work of entertaining and expression, replacing it with cues that the audience knows - so that you get the outline of a movie, rather than an actual movie.

So yes, sometimes you have the outline of a fanfic - formulas that substitute for a story of a more traditional form. This is where I lost track of the conversation, though. I'm still not sure what a formula is or how to know one when I see one. Does shortcut mean that anything classifiable under the Borg Plot Classification is a formulaic story? Do you have to write a new plot to avoid formula, or is it enough to write a certain way?

I gave as an example the tried-and-true J/C formula of Janeway finally realizing after an unspecified number of years that she can't live without Chakotay any longer. I think those who said that formulas no longer satisfy them would dislike such a story because of the formula itself. My only criticism of the Sudden Realization formula story is that the Sudden Realization itself is rarely justified. If someone makes me believe that Janeway can't live without Chakotay any longer, then I consider it a good story, however popular the plot.

On the other hand, you can fail to motivate an original plot - it's not only formulas that get sent out into the ether without sufficient verisimilitude. I'm rewriting Colony because it's the outline of a novel, rather than the novella I wanted it to be. Yet some people liked it - sci-fi fans more than others, I suspect, because sf is a genre where originality vs. formula has long been more important than showing vs. telling. You can, in other words, tell all you want as long as the story you're telling is new - Foundation, a novella-long set of dialogues, is a good example of just what you could get away with once upon a time.

Well, that was a roundabout and oxymoronic way of saying I can't blog right now because I'm busy rewriting Colony.

Charybdis III

Yet more demands of poor fanfic writers - Bjorn wants less tunnel-vision:

An unnamed SG-1 fan wants scientific accuracy. Others want more style, or less style, more plot or less plot, a sprinkle of this and a dash of that. Lori responds to some of these demands with her diplomatic version of my favorite saying, Have you ever seen TOS? For Bjorn I'll translate it, Do you read sci-fi?

Yes, it would be nice if we could all plot perfectly, write like the poets, display a perfect understanding of human nature, know every last factoid about our subject matter, and predict the cultural impact of science down to painting the moon blue. There's just one little problem - it's impossible.

No one omits plot because of a personal prejudice against it. Writers write bad plots because that's the best they can do. No one says, today I'll make my prose dull and leaden - they do the best they can. If a writer seems to get by on just plot (as many genre novelists do), that means they're being read despite their disabilities, not because of them. If a fanfic writer does the Mary Sue, it's not because she's decided that being reviled by fandom would be a nice change of pace - she merely lacks the skill to conceal herself.

Bjorn takes the failure of fanfic writers at what is arguably the hardest challenge in fiction today, that is, inventing and conveying future cultural changes caused by scientific innovation, and equates it with tunnel vision. It's these outright demands for genius that are the real tunnel vision of the genre discussion. Bjorn is far from the first to demand it; he was just the most recent with his roundabout way of asking, Why aren't you Ursula LeGuin?

There need be no deeper reason for the deficiencies of genre and fanfic than the simple one that writing is hard. No psychoanalysis or classification is necessary. If you want it done better, you're going to have to do it yourself.

Charybdis and Motive

Lori is still quoting Minisoo, and I now see that according to Minisoo's definition, I would be a cathartic writer, because I don't care about my audience in her sense of caring. But I am not actually cathartic, according to the dictionary definition Lori provided. Although I wouldn't choose to write without the muse, the muse is by no means forcing me to write; it is not the monkey on my back Lori portrays her muse as being.

I usually am quite literal about the muse, but when I say the muse made me write my first fic, that's not quite true. The muse came up with the story and pestered me with thoughts of Ymn for a few nights before I took out the laptop and typed it up for her, but that was not true catharsis. I didn't feel relieved. I just started more stories and the muse snowballed. If I wanted to get the muse off my back, I would never have let her near a keyboard. I would have gone cold-turkey. I've written enough in my life to know that writing is not something you can do just this once, as an experiment. Writing is like thinking - once you start, you can't stop. One doesn't normally try to exorcise thoughts.

Tracing it back to the source blog, there isn't much left to the distinction between the alleged storyteller and cathartic writer. Either one can write well, either one can write badly, either one can write because of the muse, either one can feel catharsis. The only distinction that Minisoo holds up the whole way is that she, in the guise of storytellers, has a dynamic going with the audience that the other camp does not. First off, this isn't true - the main dynamic for most writers is not with the audience but with the fanon and possibly a beta reader or two. Minisoo makes clear that she has some sort of cultural ideal of storytelling behind her statements, but she doesn't make a good case for a real feedback loop in writing. Fanon, as in the general written body of fanfic, tells you much more about what is and isn't an appropriate story than the audience does directly. Secondly, the storytelling/catharsis split cuts straight across Sarah T.'s distinction between aesthetic (good) and social (bad) writers.

Yes, good and bad again. Whether it started out this way, this discussion has turned into a game of peg the badfic writers. In Minisoo's scheme (as filtered through Lori), the badfic writers are a subset of the cathartic (antisocial) writers. On Sarah's continuum, the badfic writers are at the social end.

Just that part alone tells me that this is a personality debate, not a real discussion of fanfic. It is, therefore, not going to end, as someone else mentioned. But at least it's made me think once again about motive in fanfiction. (I have had the feeling since the whole muse blog blowout that the misinterpretation of my statements about the muse had a lot to do with statements I made in Zendom a while back about ulterior motives in fanfiction.)

The current debate is about fanfic writers' motives for writing. I believe that if someone can tell your motive for writing your story, then it's a bad story. If someone can tell your motive for writing fanfic in general, then you're a bad writer. In a way, this is what people are saying. When Sarah T. can tell you're writing in order to socialize, she calls that bad fic. When Lori can psychoanalyze you based on your writing, she calls that bad fic. If I even suspect certain ulterior motives, I'm outta there.

I've never said that my reason for writing is the real reason, because as far as I'm concerned, the writer's motive is irrelevant unless it happens to reach out and hit the reader on the head with an anvil (bad!). From the reader's end (and in judging fic, we do it as the reader), there is only one good reason for writing a story: the story itself. Not the audience, not catharsis, not your social set, not aesthetics, not dysfunction, just the story.

If you have another motive, keep it to yourself. I get enough anvils on the head from Joss.

Scylla and Charybdis

Lori blogged about motivation in fanfic, and I said: You said someone said, "For storytellers, it's all about the dynamic between writer/speaker and audience." Then you went on to say how the catharsis was also a cry to the audience. Where do people who don't write for an audience at all fit in?

I don't have time to go back to the original blogs, since I'm going away to a keyboardless place for the weekend, so I'm probably misinterpreting some of this blogversation. I'm not aiming for accurate representation; this is just my take on the words and phrases being tossed around. You have been warned.

It looked to me like the source bloggers were saying that good writers want to communicate with their audience and bad writers are just doing a brain dump onto the keyboard without regard for their audience. Lori did a little analysis of the more godawful and oversensitive of the bad writers, saying that they also were communicating something to the audience - a plea for approval, perhaps. I noticed that no one acknowledged doing it purely for yourself as a legitimate (source blog) or possible (Lori's blog) option. (I'm sure Lori would have defended the introverts if she'd had the time.)

I don't think you have to be doing some "dynamic" thing with your audience in order to be a good writer, and I don't think that literary merit is determined by anything but the audience's enjoyment of the work. In fact, a work that both rabid 'shippers with "no feeling for language & no love of prose" and English professors slumming here in fandom can appreciate has more true literary merit than Pulitzer material that the average fan doesn't enjoy. Shakespeare wrote to both levels, and if we can't do it, that's our fault, not our readers'.

And Shakespeare is dead now, so he's not doing anything dynamic with his audience. It makes no difference today whether he was interested in his audience or in his dysfunctions or in his next paycheck. Only the words on paper matter.

Spectacle

I felt like a how-to-write book, so I browsed through the library shelves. I didn't spot the book Mike recommended, but I did find Novelist's Essential Guide to Creating Plot by J. Madison Davis. I'd barely started it on the T when I found the section on Spectacle and decided this was the book for me. Spectacle is one of the six basic dramatic elements, according to Aristotle. Aristotle rates it the least important.

Spectacle is the flashy stuff, like invisible rabbits slamming doors or helicopters landing on stage, or, as I tried to explain on a mailing list once, basic biology lessons:

Again, that was J. Madison Davis, award-winning novelist, not yours truly. If it had been me, all that qualification ("might be," "usually," "may be," "may," "usually" again) would be replaced with definite, vigorous absolutes.

Speaking of public vindication of previously unpopular opinions of mine, the recent VVS9 implosion was quite gratifying. You wonder (if you're an INTP) how so many people can be so clueless about so obvious a pattern over so long a time, especially when you saw the writing on the wall (or you were the writing on the wall) so early on. I admit, another disgruntled VVS8 writer egged me on to make some less-than-over-it comments on the issue, but I don't feel vindictive about VVS8 this long after the fact. I'm just happy to see clues sprouting up all over. And it's hard, too hard, to pass up the opportunity to say...

I told you so.

Six Degrees of Alternation

I'm getting the idea, from the ongoing discussion of AU's, that AU's are different things to different people. I've come to the conclusion that travel between the canon universe and the AU, and the degree of technobabble excusing the AU, are issues of story structure rather than of AU type. I think I can come up with six different types of AU if I try hard enough, and make up names for them to boot:

The Borg AU Classification

1. Far Alternate: the most extreme AU vision changes the setting to something entirely alien. The characters are transported into medieval times, the Paleolithic or (in the case of non-scifi shows) outer space. Apparently this sort of AU is more popular in other fandoms than in Trek.
2. Near Alternate: the domain of inversion-universes, where the characters and settings are similar, but universe-level details have been changed - e.g., the Federation is now the bad guys, or all the male characters are now women, or Chakotay is the Starfleet officer and Janeway is the Maquis rebel. Such an AU is not rooted at any particular decisive event or turning point.
3. Alternate Timeline: the classic AU, rooted at a certain point of past canon - one decision is decided differently, and the rest of the show is changed. This is the "It's a Wonderful Life" approach to fanfic. Such an AU can be spotted by the question it answers, such as, what if the Maquis had mutinied? (See MJB's Revolution.)
4. Canon AU: a Near Alternate or Alternate Timeline established in canon. The classic canon AU is the Mirror-Mirror Universe, although the Year of Hell and the Admiral's timeline would also qualify. See, for example, DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe.
5. Divergent Canonical: a divergence that begins with the canon universe, and ends up places canon is unlikely to go. Although similar to Alternate Timelines, Divergent Canonical has a break point which is not sharply defined and therefore is not central to the structure of the AU, making this approach the most open-ended and fruitful. Divergent Canonical stories are the longest - once you start diverting, it's hard to stop. Such stories, if written before the fact, may be considered simple fanfiction. (The show may end this way.) If written after the fact, some may be more properly considered fanfix than AU. (The show should have ended this way.) See, for example, Virtual Season 7.5. There are non-fanfix examples as well; see The Captain and the Counselor series.
6. Convergent Canonical: the stealth AU tweaks the past in such a way as not to disturb the present. Like Divergent Canonical, Convergent Canonical may be considered simple fanfic. No known rules of canon are broken, but this approach usually pushes the envelope beyond what is decent and believable about canon. For example, any fanfic in which Tom Paris is Kathryn Janeway's father, or in which Janeway and Chakotay met at Starfleet Academy, had a love child, and were brainwashed to forget it all (e.g., Regression) would qualify as Convergent Canonical. Bonus points if the love child is Tom Paris.

What's left? What makes a story truly canonical? In some sense, everything we write is AU; only the screenwriters are writing canon. I believe the question of classifying fanfic explicitly as AU is rooted, not in canon, but in fanon. That is, a typical J/C-happily-ever-after story is fanonical for the J/C subgenre and therefore not an AU, although according to the list above it would qualify as Divergent Canonical. Likewise for any other common pairing, and possibly even obscure or squicky pairings.

On the other hand, any time you change the universe, rather than just the characters and pairings, you're deep into the AU realm - even if you do it manually, by, say, letting the Borg win. An AU is like obscenity - you'll know it when you see it.

I think that's enough fanalysis for one night.

I can't believe I voted the whole thing...

I can't believe I voted the whole thing...

Technically, I'm not done with the ASC Awards yet - there's best author, and I have no excuse like "I don't read authors," the way I did for "I don't read P/T."

If you must go and vote for me just to spoil my blog arguments, try not to make it so obvious. Sheesh, try to make a point around here...

Are They Blogging About Me?

Are They Blogging About Me?

Someone mentioned a blog, and I surfed around a bit and read Lori's half of her pseudoblogchat with Teague. I said something to Christine recently about why I hadn't posted Thrive to ASC this year. Part of it was the time of year that I wrote it - I don't have time to post or read new stuff during the ASC Awards season, which tends to last from February to April, somehow. Also, I have a different standard when posting to ASC than when posting to a newsgroup of J/C fanatics, for example. I shouldn't say a different standard, I should say, I have a standard.

And that leads to the question, not of whether I underrate my own fic and am femininely modest about it, but of how one rates fic in the first place. I know I have a standard, but I'm far from knowing what it is. What disturbed me about "Thrive"? I told Christine I didn't want to be an intense writer, that angst is to characterization as the drabble is to structure. (Ok, maybe I didn't say that, but I'm saying it now.) I don't go by what people like - I like my stories, every last one, every last word of them, but that doesn't mean that I know how other people feel about them.

For instance, take the very best thing I wrote this past year, the tragic, inspired work that haunted me for weeks afterwards - Yesterday, When I Was Borg. It was a filk. I admit, from a technical standpoint, it may not have been as good as "Wreck of the Alternate Voyager", but it's my favorite nonetheless. So far, it's garnered one pity-vote from Seema in the ASC Awards. (I'm not begging for more votes - they would spoil my point here.)

Now you can go and vote for "The Dance" all you want, but what am I to think of the reading public's appreciation for 225k of "The Museum", when they clearly have no feeling for even those few brief stanzas of genius in which Seven mourns, "Yesterday, the cube was green; a million burning stars, still waiting to be seen..."? Well?

That's something of a facetious example, but I mean it to demonstrate that the author's relationship to her work (and through it, to her readers) is something that can't be easily pinned down to agreeing or disagreeing with the general opinion of fandom. In other words, maybe I'm not suspicious of my stories; maybe I'm suspicious of my readers.

Or maybe it's something else entirely...

High Fic vs. Low Fic

High Fic vs. Low Fic

Another thing I've noticed about the VOY section of the ASC Awards this year is the prevalence of humor far beyond the humor category. Anywhere Liz goes, humor follows, and the Die Seven Die category only compounded the giggling.

Humor is fine in its place, but it's hardly High Fic. Here's my personal ranking of fanfic genres, plus annotations of what most sane people would change about it. The order is high fic to low fic.

1. Adventure
2. Filk (most people would call it low fic)
3. Romance
4. Character stories
5. Humor
6. Vignettes
7. Drabbles
8. Angst (most people would call this high fic)
9. Haiku
10. Slash
11. Smut
12. Real people fic

I'm not sure which order slash and smut should be in - I put slash first because the writers seem to think they're saying something more than smut alone would say, if it said anything at all.

One Hit Wonders

One Hit Wonders

I've been voting for the same people over and over again in the ASC awards and at AAA. It's not just that they're my friends, it's also that they seem to write everything, or at least almost everything good. There seem to be very few one-hit wonders in fandom. Maybe the author of Lt. Keegan (in ASC in the Voyager Lower Decks category) is one - I don't think I ever managed to get through with my feedback, a sure sign of disappearance, but I don't know whether there were hits before that particular one.

I'd post another song from Buffy Anne Supergirl, but I have more voting to do first. If you want something good to read, hop over to Zendom for Christine's article.

Mockery and Meta-sharks

Mockery and Meta-sharks

You get old, you get bitter, you start writing...metafic. Metafic is fic about fic, something that looks like a normal piece of fanfiction, but is actually a reflection upon fandom and the show. Pardon me for illustrating with examples taken from my Voyager stories - there will be Buffy content (and spoilers) at the end.

Metafic can deal with the fan's thoughts about writing (e.g., The Author), her end-of series sentimentality (A Light Beyond), the anti-canonical traditions of fanon (The Efficiency Expert), or the foibles of TPTB (DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe). Of course, any decent AU fic is an opportunity for frequent digs at TPTB (The Museum), but it requires an effort to take years of abuse from TPTB and twist it around after the fact into the story you wanted them to tell (Lurking).

It may sound like all fic is metafic, and all fic queens are bitter, but I don't believe so. Sometimes a story is just a story (Taboo). Some fanfic, it has been alleged, could go pro if you just swapped out the trademarked names and airbrushed the galactic map (Colony). Other times, the act of writing is itself the protest, while the fic, in order to be a proper slap in the face of TPTB, must be as tame and believable as possible (Take it on the Run) - "C/7?" says the fan meta-metafictionally, "I'll show you C/7!"

If not all fic is metafic, surely all humorous fic is parody. Sometimes the mockery is overt (Seven of Borg), sometimes it's borderline (The Bottle of Bajoran Blue Wine), but all our shows are dramas - funny how no one writes sitcomfic - so all our humor clashes with the genre, making parody. It is not our place to write "The Trouble with Tribbles" - the fan takes the show too seriously. It is the producers who tend to take the show too lightly, to our unending bitterness.

This post is not about Trek. (Pardon the meta-contradiction.) This post is about "Normal Again", the most recent BtVS episode. Once again, we find The Jossy One doing it better than the fans. I blogged once that I would never write Buffy because it was already fanfic. First it was The Musical to End All Filk, and now, now my personal territory, the exclusive BOFQ genre of metafic, has been Jossed. They warned me about getting Jossed, but I always thought it was a plot thing. If I'd known he had this little respect for the division of labor, I'd have gone back to writing J/C (and that's saying a lot).

Let's review it for him: The producer produces the show. The fans mock the show. The producer produces the plot holes. The fans mock the plot holes. The producer produces first-order stories. The fans write meta-fic. It's a simple system that has worked for thirty-five years now in Trekdom. Undermining the system because you're some sort of artistic genius who's caught on to the secret meta-heart of fanfic and is now sucking it dry, leaving us fans nothing to write...well, that's just not acceptable. Why can't you write mediocre time-travel episodes like Brannon Braga, eh? Is that asking so much?

What did he do? the unvamped reader may ask. Think of it as "The Six Years of Hell" - a reverse dream-sequence in which Buffy's superheroic feats are merely a symptom of her pesky catatonic schizophrenia for which she's been institutionalized all these years. Which is the dream state and which the reality is an open question at the end of the episode, and perhaps will still be at the end of the season. On one level, this is just more Cruelty to Buffy, but if you think Joss drew the line there, refraining from fan-level mockery of his own show, you must come from a happier fandom than BtVS.

It was lovely, it was cutting - the best bit being when the doctor in the institution told Catatonia Buffy that she used to hallucinate much more impressive enemies than this season's batch of a few evil geeks she went to high school with. Second only to that was Buffy's own realization that her slayer-fantasy was ludicrous - she told Dawn so while she was stalking her in order to bring a premature and violent end to her Sunnydale delusions. In the midst of an episode full of self-mockery, Joss dares a poignant fannish double-reverse (I did one at the end of A Maquis Holiday, but of course it can't compare), when Joyce is trying to convince Buffy to return to the land of the sane and instead convinces her to go back to vampire-slaying.

Joss jumped the meta-shark, he confessed his sins of the season - and I do believe that they were sins rather than an intentional setup for a final Catatonia Buffy arc - but he did it so well that we are forced to forgive him. There is a law in literature, there is a social contract of fandom, that was, strangely enough, coined by Freud: "I promise to believe anything that can be made to look reasonable."

Still, he should have made it look reasonable from the start, or left it to the fans to make it look reasonable after the fact - that's our job.

Sci-fi is the only literature

Sci-fi is the only literature

It's not really tonight's topic, I just wanted to get it off my chest.

Note to Christine: The Fellowship of the Suit sounds like it was ripped off from "The Wonderful Ice-Cream Suit", one of Ray Bradbury's better-known short stories (and he's a man known for his short stories). Bradbury used to write a short story a week; I think he did it for years. I tried it; it lasted for a couple of weeks. Anyway, the Ice-Cream Suit isn't really sci-fi, but that could be said of a lot of Bradbury's sci-fi proper. It's all a bit fantastic, like "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed", one of his many tales of endangered Martians on a Mars that's like a bit of the Old West, oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and all.

One other note on something Christine said in her zendom article, and that Lori agreed with by blog: what's so wrong about Godawful? Yes, it's a questionable honor to be chosen as Worst of the Web, but I've known a couple of people who held that dubious distinction, and they didn't stop writing. Her friends rallied around one of them, and still revile Godawful whenever it's mentioned. The other one admitted that her story was, in a word, Godawful. It was an ill-conceived round-robin that she knew deserved its place on that infamous Worst Of site.

Stop by Godawful sometime and ask yourself, is it really so bad to scare these people off writing? They put their fic up in public where anyone can stumble over it, read it accidentally and be squicked in their sense of literary propriety. If we can have rec pages, why not anti-rec pages? Silence is not enough to protect the innocent.

Besides, Godawful serves an educational purpose, just like Bad Fanfic! No Biscuit! claims to. I've never quite understood why it's acceptable to mock bad writers on BF!NB! but wrong to quote them directly (getting them far more hits than their fic merits) on Godawful. In either case, the lesson of Don't Try This At Home is one that can't be overemphasized. Not every newbie knows the difference between good and bad fic - else whence the hordes of fluffy-pairing-fic fans?

Even BOFQ's can appreciate the occasional fic that's so bad it's good. Don't tell me you haven't read your share of bad, bad fanfic - I was there in fluffdom with you. I heard you squicking.

Originality is such a lonely word...

Originality is such a lonely word...everyone is so un-new

Many thanks to Jintian for summarizing the whole HP plagiarism debate in her blog for those of us who don't have two hours a day to follow glass_onion when it gets rowdy. Well, you know I'm going to have an opinion. Let me just get out the soapbox...

I give Harry Potterdom a free pass. Let them rip off Buffy. Let them query-replace whole novels. (I recommend Emacs for ease of query-replacement.) Let them steal other people's fanfic, even. Go ahead, rip me off.

It was Jintian herself, in the case of real people fic, who implied that people who live in glass fandoms shouldn't throw stones - yet the stones are flying now. So the question that occurs to me is not why plagiarize? but why dost thou protest so much? Aren't we all just the bottom-feeders of the literary ocean? We "original" fanfic writers use unoriginal characters in our own unique ways. The HP plagiarists use unoriginal characters and unoriginal lines in their own unique ways.

We are artisans, not artists - if you value originality so highly, why not write in a genre that emphasizes it? Insisting on originality in fanfic seems like trying to have your cake and eat it too - you want the ease and accessibility of fandom, plus the glory of having been "original". I don't think there's room in this town for the both of them.

Plagiarism is a term of disapprobation that can only apply in a context where originality was expected in the first place. This isn't Martin Luther King Jr.'s dissertation, people, this is fanfic. We frown on originality. We abhor the Mary Sue. We shy away from the Delta Fleet. Fanfic is not literature, and cannot be judged by literary standards.

Fanfic is like a troop of Girl Scouts gathered around a campfire, singing the traditional campfire songs (my favorite was always "Green and Yellow", the tragic tale of a camper who ate a poisonous snake he'd mistaken for an eel), improving the verses that wanted improvement, and adding in original verses. Maybe those verses would get picked up by other scouts and passed on as the One True "Green and Yellow", or maybe they'd be forgotten, like so much ephemeral J/C flufffic. One thing's for sure, though - no girl scout would cry plagiarism if she heard her new verse (What color flowers do you want, Jesse my son? / What color flowers do you want, my beloved one? / Green and yellow, green and yellow - mamma come quick 'cause I'm very very sick and I wanna lay down and die...) coming from the next campfire over.

Fanfiction is an open-source movement. Maybe some people don't want their source spread around, but the common-law history of copyright and the longer history of mankind telling tales around campfires is on the side of the alleged plagiarists. This is what it is to tell a tale - to take the best bits (including the best zingers) of tales you heard before and put them together in a way that pleases your audience. Harry Potter, the fandom, has rediscovered the art of storytelling, and it shall not be taken away from them.

If Joss doesn't want to be quoted, he can stop broadcasting his best lines. As for the sacrosanct published authors, no one owned their lines until the printing press, and someday soon they'll be common property again. No desperate clinging to printing-press laws can hold progress off forever. The future will be open-source; the future will be fanfic.