Mom: (Running around to get her stuff together for school) I left a cookie lying around here somewhere but now I don't know where it is... so if you see a cookie...
Me: Okay.
Mom: (Spots something) AHA! I found it, nevermind.
Dad: MY COOKIE!
Mom: (With cookie in her mouth) COOKIE!
Me: ...Ohmygod.
Mom: (Her mouth still full of cookie as she leaves) The future is BLEAK!
It is 11:40 and I have been awake for 7 hours.
Showing posts with label true stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label true stories. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Friday, May 8, 2009
Holy Fandom, Guys!
I guess I took April off.
Apparently while I was gone, I acquired two new followers. Awesome! Hello, new followers!
I want to write a little bit about fandom.
I was geeking out about Harry Potter with my friend Taylor yesterday. She's writing a fanfiction and I was helping her pick out names for some original characters, and it made me start thinking about my own dabblings in that fandom and others, and why we get so attached to these worlds that don't exist and why that's important, because I feel like it is, even though I still haven't figured out why, exactly.
I was deeply entrenched in the Harry Potter fandom from the release of Book 5 to the release of Book 6 so... *checking Wikipedia* from June 2003 to July 2005. Though, in memory, it seems like it was longer.
I joined livejournal communites and roleplay forums, and was briefly a mod in one. I drew pictures. I read and reviewed fanfiction. I dressed up for book and movie releases alike and Wizard Rock concerts. I even started a very inconsistently drawn webcomic. A real life friend of mine who was similarly obsessed spent an entire day with me trying to figure out an anagram for a contest whose prize was a picture of a trophy.
A page from my inconsistently drawn webcomic.
(Click to enlarge.)
Mostly, however, what I did was write a lot of very, very bad fanfiction. My magnum opus was a 93,944 word long Draco/Hermione story called "A Perfect Day to Elope" that makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time I look at it, now.
I remember starting the first chapter sitting in athletic study hall my freshman year (I wasn't athletic in the least but I did have walking pneumonia which apparently was incompatible with gym). It was supposed to be a four chapter farce around England featuring those crazy Harry Potter kids. Then it sort of... exploded. Somehow, I was still writing it two years and thirty-five chapters later and by that point, in Chapter 35, I could barely even remember what had happened seven chapters earlier let alone at the beginning of the story. There was a lot of inconsistency, a lot of slapstick comedy, and so many flashbacks that it sometimes seemed more like a collection of disconnected short stories than a cohesive thing.
In Chapter One, a twenty-three-year-old Hermione receives a necklace as a birthday present from Ron, and in Chapter Twenty-Four we are told she hasn't seen or heard from him in five years. There is a whole scene revolving around a joke about Hermione's make-up. This scene took TWO CHAPTERS of set up to wedge in. There was an entire chapter devoted to Ginny dancing around in the kitchen singing Britney Spears. Seriously.
When I look back at the me who spent her freshman, sophomore and (part of her) junior years of high school writing a hugely overlong story and didn't even bother to have it make sense most of the time, I wonder where her friends came from. Who hung out with that person? Why did anyone like her? There is no denying, however, that the freedom of a chapter-by-chapter story, burdened as it was with a bloated kraken of a plot, and written over several very different years, allowed me a lot of freedom to experiment with what worked in my writing. I now know, for instance, that physical comedy is probably a form of humor best left for television and that there is such a thing as too many metaphors.
Half-Blood Prince killed my interest in fanfiction. When I saw JK Rowling portraying Malfoy as a complex character in his own right but a character deeply different from the Malfoy of my story (who was a card carrying Draco in Leather Pants if ever one existed), I had no interest in having anything to do with my Draco anymore. He hadn't ever existed and I felt, for some reason, that it was rude to treat Jo Rowling's characters the way I had been.
Me + Friends on Deathly Hallows release night.
That is me sitting in the front in the purple shirt wearing what I was pathetically calling a Ginny costume.
Apparently while I was gone, I acquired two new followers. Awesome! Hello, new followers!
I want to write a little bit about fandom.
I was geeking out about Harry Potter with my friend Taylor yesterday. She's writing a fanfiction and I was helping her pick out names for some original characters, and it made me start thinking about my own dabblings in that fandom and others, and why we get so attached to these worlds that don't exist and why that's important, because I feel like it is, even though I still haven't figured out why, exactly.
I was deeply entrenched in the Harry Potter fandom from the release of Book 5 to the release of Book 6 so... *checking Wikipedia* from June 2003 to July 2005. Though, in memory, it seems like it was longer.
I joined livejournal communites and roleplay forums, and was briefly a mod in one. I drew pictures. I read and reviewed fanfiction. I dressed up for book and movie releases alike and Wizard Rock concerts. I even started a very inconsistently drawn webcomic. A real life friend of mine who was similarly obsessed spent an entire day with me trying to figure out an anagram for a contest whose prize was a picture of a trophy.
A page from my inconsistently drawn webcomic.(Click to enlarge.)
Mostly, however, what I did was write a lot of very, very bad fanfiction. My magnum opus was a 93,944 word long Draco/Hermione story called "A Perfect Day to Elope" that makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time I look at it, now.
I remember starting the first chapter sitting in athletic study hall my freshman year (I wasn't athletic in the least but I did have walking pneumonia which apparently was incompatible with gym). It was supposed to be a four chapter farce around England featuring those crazy Harry Potter kids. Then it sort of... exploded. Somehow, I was still writing it two years and thirty-five chapters later and by that point, in Chapter 35, I could barely even remember what had happened seven chapters earlier let alone at the beginning of the story. There was a lot of inconsistency, a lot of slapstick comedy, and so many flashbacks that it sometimes seemed more like a collection of disconnected short stories than a cohesive thing.
In Chapter One, a twenty-three-year-old Hermione receives a necklace as a birthday present from Ron, and in Chapter Twenty-Four we are told she hasn't seen or heard from him in five years. There is a whole scene revolving around a joke about Hermione's make-up. This scene took TWO CHAPTERS of set up to wedge in. There was an entire chapter devoted to Ginny dancing around in the kitchen singing Britney Spears. Seriously.
When I look back at the me who spent her freshman, sophomore and (part of her) junior years of high school writing a hugely overlong story and didn't even bother to have it make sense most of the time, I wonder where her friends came from. Who hung out with that person? Why did anyone like her? There is no denying, however, that the freedom of a chapter-by-chapter story, burdened as it was with a bloated kraken of a plot, and written over several very different years, allowed me a lot of freedom to experiment with what worked in my writing. I now know, for instance, that physical comedy is probably a form of humor best left for television and that there is such a thing as too many metaphors.
Half-Blood Prince killed my interest in fanfiction. When I saw JK Rowling portraying Malfoy as a complex character in his own right but a character deeply different from the Malfoy of my story (who was a card carrying Draco in Leather Pants if ever one existed), I had no interest in having anything to do with my Draco anymore. He hadn't ever existed and I felt, for some reason, that it was rude to treat Jo Rowling's characters the way I had been.
Me + Friends on Deathly Hallows release night.That is me sitting in the front in the purple shirt wearing what I was pathetically calling a Ginny costume.
But since then I have had other encounters with fandom and I have to admit I sort of love it, as an entity. Last summer I was briefly but passionately sucked into the Twilight fandom, largely fueled by my fury that Jacob would not be bursting into Edward and Bella's wedding and sweeping her away on a motorcycle, as I had hoped. (In fact, I arrived in that fandom pretty much just in time for the Sparkledammerung drama, which was fun.) and recently I've come to wish that the True Blood/Sookie Stackhouse fandom was less terrifying as I would certainly like to throw my hat into that arena (but they are still fueled by hormones and nightmares so I still can't. Woe.).
What is it that makes us get sucked into these things? As Fandom Wank will prove, while fandoms may start off as places where people come together to talk about a shared love of a book/movie/band/person/vampire, what they grow into over time can have nothing to do with that original shared interested. The ingroup lingo that grows up in one fandom and then moves over to another as if by mitosis, the fighting, the squealing, oh God, the drama. Why does anyone do it? Why are we not content to like what we like in lonely peace?
The answer probably has something to do with the power of fiction, but I'm just gonna say this about screaming: in any series (and they are mostly series) there are going to be things that make you want to scream, and I suppose we all feel a little less crazy screaming with someone else, loudly and in all capital letters.
And there's also the fanfic.
(tl;dr: Fandom is crazy, but I love it.)
What is it that makes us get sucked into these things? As Fandom Wank will prove, while fandoms may start off as places where people come together to talk about a shared love of a book/movie/band/person/vampire, what they grow into over time can have nothing to do with that original shared interested. The ingroup lingo that grows up in one fandom and then moves over to another as if by mitosis, the fighting, the squealing, oh God, the drama. Why does anyone do it? Why are we not content to like what we like in lonely peace?
The answer probably has something to do with the power of fiction, but I'm just gonna say this about screaming: in any series (and they are mostly series) there are going to be things that make you want to scream, and I suppose we all feel a little less crazy screaming with someone else, loudly and in all capital letters.
And there's also the fanfic.
(tl;dr: Fandom is crazy, but I love it.)
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Decision time!
I have made a decision.
I don't know what it is about blogs that makes me want to overshare, but starting tomorrow I'm going to start thinking of memories that are actually, like, interesting, like the week I set up a lot of profiles on dating sites, or the time a robot tried to chat me up on facebook (but I figured him out, no worries!), or the time a mob of children chased me through the zoo shouting "Foreigner! Foreigner!"
Or maybe I'll explain "Jezebel".
Or talk about the time I turned my back in China and my tour group got sucked into a black hole and I had to wander around a silk worm factory by myself until they found me.
Or the many times my skirt has fallen off on-stage (it was twice, but still).
Or how I used to use tricks my dad taught me to trick him with fake progress reports in high school!
Or the time a homeless man tried to convince me he knew where twenty-thousand dollars was hidden (and I sort of believed him).
Man, I could be so much more interesting.
I don't know what it is about blogs that makes me want to overshare, but starting tomorrow I'm going to start thinking of memories that are actually, like, interesting, like the week I set up a lot of profiles on dating sites, or the time a robot tried to chat me up on facebook (but I figured him out, no worries!), or the time a mob of children chased me through the zoo shouting "Foreigner! Foreigner!"
Or maybe I'll explain "Jezebel".
Or talk about the time I turned my back in China and my tour group got sucked into a black hole and I had to wander around a silk worm factory by myself until they found me.
Or the many times my skirt has fallen off on-stage (it was twice, but still).
Or how I used to use tricks my dad taught me to trick him with fake progress reports in high school!
Or the time a homeless man tried to convince me he knew where twenty-thousand dollars was hidden (and I sort of believed him).
Man, I could be so much more interesting.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
St. Adelaide was a cool lady
I am not being a very good dieter, but the thing about diets is that if you do badly one day you have to try again the next day. Go me!
I am not being a very good writer, either. I picked up my brand new idea book today, snuggled up with my pillow to do some awesome brainstorming, and promptly spent about an hour trying to decide the name of the CHURCH where one of the MC's GRANDPARENTS were married.
Even when I make myself think about the characters I procrastinate! AGH!
And it was St. Adelaide of Burgundy Catholic Church, just in case you're interested.
St. Adelaide is the patron saint of brides and also had the sort of shrewd longevity that lead her to not only outlive her first husband, which was not a terribly impressive feat as he was poisoned, but parlay that survival into a second marriage with Otto the Great, who was at the time Holy Roman Emperor and who, surprisingly, crowned her Empress at their wedding. She outlived him, as well, and was actually quite powerful in the court until her daughter-in-law, Theophano, had her exiled. Apparently Theophano didn't know that Adelaide would get her revenge not by any kind of scheming but just by waiting. She outlived Theophano, too, and came back to be regent in her grandson's stead until he was old enough to rule, making her effectively head of the entire Roman Empire, though I don't actually know if the Roman Empire was that large at the time. After he did grow up and take his place, she left and devoted her life to charity, which was what lead to her canonization.
This is the exact sort of awesome slow-motion power climb that my character's grandmother would approve of, so it seemed appropriate. Whether or not I will actually include the name of the church is... to be decided, but now that I've written it all out I am sort of glad I know that. It's interesting.
On the other hand, I got very little done today. I spent a good long time transferring my hand-drawn family trees to the computer, but that doesn't actually seem that important. I really love this book, but it's got to the point where it's so big I don't even know where to start. It's twisty and layered and beautiful, but it doesn't really have a "beginning". We're sort of jumping into the middle, right, and when you have a whole pool to jump into how do you choose where to land? Stupid, stupid.
Back to New York on Monday. Excited.
I am not being a very good writer, either. I picked up my brand new idea book today, snuggled up with my pillow to do some awesome brainstorming, and promptly spent about an hour trying to decide the name of the CHURCH where one of the MC's GRANDPARENTS were married.
Even when I make myself think about the characters I procrastinate! AGH!
And it was St. Adelaide of Burgundy Catholic Church, just in case you're interested.
St. Adelaide is the patron saint of brides and also had the sort of shrewd longevity that lead her to not only outlive her first husband, which was not a terribly impressive feat as he was poisoned, but parlay that survival into a second marriage with Otto the Great, who was at the time Holy Roman Emperor and who, surprisingly, crowned her Empress at their wedding. She outlived him, as well, and was actually quite powerful in the court until her daughter-in-law, Theophano, had her exiled. Apparently Theophano didn't know that Adelaide would get her revenge not by any kind of scheming but just by waiting. She outlived Theophano, too, and came back to be regent in her grandson's stead until he was old enough to rule, making her effectively head of the entire Roman Empire, though I don't actually know if the Roman Empire was that large at the time. After he did grow up and take his place, she left and devoted her life to charity, which was what lead to her canonization.
This is the exact sort of awesome slow-motion power climb that my character's grandmother would approve of, so it seemed appropriate. Whether or not I will actually include the name of the church is... to be decided, but now that I've written it all out I am sort of glad I know that. It's interesting.
On the other hand, I got very little done today. I spent a good long time transferring my hand-drawn family trees to the computer, but that doesn't actually seem that important. I really love this book, but it's got to the point where it's so big I don't even know where to start. It's twisty and layered and beautiful, but it doesn't really have a "beginning". We're sort of jumping into the middle, right, and when you have a whole pool to jump into how do you choose where to land? Stupid, stupid.
Back to New York on Monday. Excited.
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