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.

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.)

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.

This post took me nearly two hours to write

glamrocksupergrl (1:03:34 AM): what should i blog about?

ibi137 (1:03:58 AM): temporary tattoos

glamrocksupergrl (1:04:18 AM): hmmm

glamrocksupergrl (1:04:24 AM): what can i say about temporary tattoos?

ibi137 (1:06:05 AM): the fact that your friend is considering getting a "mister sofftee" tramp stamp

I forgot I had this blog. I guess I must be registered at every blog site on the internet, by now, so it shouldn't really surprise me. I must start one at least twice a year, before always returning faithfully to my much-ignored livejournal. which is still not updated too often because of the stigma of having a livejournal. As I said in a post last month: "I only seem to write here when I want to talk about writing." Which is true, and a little meta, but whatever. Nobody wants to listen to me talking about writing as often as I want to.

I am, apparently, one of those people who opens a new blog by pointing out it is a new blog. Though, in fact, I suppose this is an "old" blog, just an empty one. Oh well, that is what we do. Stretching out to measure our little inch of the internet, like in Kindergarten when they make you flap your arms and spin around before you do anything in P.E. Everybody ends up with enough space except for the kid against the wall, who keeps hitting his elbow.

There are only three weeks until Christmas. This will be the second year in a row that I am not in Chicago, or even in Oak Park (to be more specific) or Illinois (to be more broad), for the build-up, which is a little... I don't know. It won't be as weird as the Christmas season in Japan. Japanese people have been convinced by American ad execs that Colonel Sanders is the same person as Santa Claus (That said with absolutely no exaggeration. They are literally lead to believe that the jovial, bearded man in the red suit likes to wear a vaguely confederate white suit and sell mass-produced fried chicken for the rest of the year.) and that everyone in American goes to KFC and lines up for their Christmas bucket on the eve. Also, Japan has invented this thing called a "Christmas cake", which they order weeks in advance. Christmas in Japan is a little like Chinese food in America. That is, all the parts the consumers like about it were completely invented somewhere in transit.

The Christmas season in New York should be a little more normal. My chances of visiting a Buddhist temple or nearly getting run over by a very fast-moving tractor in the middle of a fish market on Christmas eve morning are greatly lowered, but my chances of eating gingerbread cookies go up quite a bit. I'm not going to miss putting up the tree this year, at least, though I may miss lunch at the Walnut Room in Marshall Field's, lights at Brookfield Zoo, seeing the silly lamp-post decorations on Lake street, ice skating in Millenium Park, the Christkindlmarket on Daley Plaza, etc. Good Christmas-y Chicago stuff, and my own traditions, too, like making molded chocolates. I didn't get to do that last year, either. I feel my chocolate molds are probably getting dusty.

My haul used to grow larger every year. I think when I was a senior in high school I made over 400 pieces. Little chocolate stockings and santas and candy canes. It was relaxing, and it felt good to walk around with enough that I could see any random person in the hallway and shout "Hey! You want a Christmas present?" Of course, these days I wouldn't see enough people to give out so many, but it was still fun experimenting with different mix-ins. My favorite was white chocolate with broken up candy canes in it. It was a little like the peppermint ice at Fannie Mae, which makes me wonder why Fannie Mae charges so much, as the recipe is apparently so simple

When I was fourteen we spent Christmas in Paris, where my mom's best friend was living at the time, in this great apartment right near the Eiffel tower. This was also the Christmas that I spent in tears on the bathroom floor while my mom tried to bribe me away from mental breakdown with a shiny new iPod. That was memorable. I think I may have eaten turtle stew for dinner. But I would remember something like that if it had happened, right? I hope so. I think it was salty.

In short: I am no good at being away from home for Christmas.

This story was about Paris, though, and also about chocolate. This is what tied it all together. Christmas, Paris, Chocolate and Le Bon Marche's cake lady.

She was amazing and pervasive. This skinny, pale woman with shiny, red strawberry lips and a short, dark bob coiffed so perfectly that it looked almost like a wig made of chocolate fondant. She had wide-set, sadly French eyes and good cheekbones, but most of all she was extraordinary in two ways:

1) She was holding a chocolate cake the approximate size and shape of a Nintendo Gamecube, imprinted over and over again with the French word for cake: "gateau gateau gateau" ("What's a gate-ow?" I asked my dad), on a white plate beside her face. And

2) she had freckles.

As a pale, skinny kid with, admittedly, less fabulous hair but many, many more freckles, spotting a model so glamorous holding something so obviously delicious in a metro ad was one thing in the first, but I am not sure that before then I had ever noticed someone else's freckles so keenly, or been so proud of my own. And the woman was everywhere. I could count on spotting her stony face at least three times in any given metro stop, and she was plastered on walls, too, and billboards. My family played a game of pointing her out whenever we saw her, and I played even after my brother and parents had grown bored of it. My dad had given me his old camcorder to record the trip, I having just recently declared my new dream of being the First Woman to Win An Oscar for Best Director and so obviously needing to start practicing on a Sony Handycam ASAP. I don't think he or I realized I was doing it, but when he got home and looked at the footage it contained three things: one shot of the outside of the Louvre, one shot from the Arc de Triomphe, and shot after shot of Le Bon Marche's cake lady each time I had spotted her: larger than life, gorgeous, and freckled.

My mom eventually went to Le Bon Marche and brought back a palm-sized version of the cake for me. It wasn't as delicious as its advertisement made it look, but that's always the case. I hadn't really wanted to eat it, anyway. It was enough to be holding what I could view as a little piece of that photograph.

Anyway, I went home and forgot about Le Bon Marche's cake lady. That is, until I was nineteen and I cut off all my hair, inspired by my love of Audrey Tautou's Amelie and a stated desire to "cut off the dead ends of my life." (As an aside, it apparently takes more than a haircut to completely cut off one "dead ends". Mine keep coming back, but I do sort of love them, now, so I guess it's good I didn't cut them out too completely.) A few days after the cut, when I was used to it but no one else was, I was getting out of the shower, with my hair and bangs slicked down with water. I passed my mom in the hall and she stopped. "You know," she said, "You kind of look like that...cake lady. You know, that woman in the ads in Paris." I had to think back further than usual to remember, but then I did, and I couldn't stop smiling for the rest of the day. Possibly the rest of the week. I briefly entertained the idea that I had subconsciously chosen the bob cut because of my young fascination with that ad, but if I believed that I would have to doubt my own sanity. Suffice to say, perhaps the cut was a long time coming.

My mom is, of course, insane for thinking I look anything like Le Bon Marche's cake lady, but it was nice, anyway. It's a weird feeling when someone tells you you've accomplished exactly what you meant to, even more so when you'd forgotten that you meant it at all.

Now that I think about it, that might not have been the Christmas trip at all. It was probably the 2001 summer trip. Ah, well, it doesn't matter. I'll always have a soft spot for that twiggy woman and her disproportionately large cake.

Fin.

(I promise I will never write an entry this long again. Jesus Christ.)