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This is my third year doing these year-end wrap-ups. It's a nice tradition, and allows me to purge my guilt and shame over all the things I swore I was going to do but didn't so that I can move on with the new year.
In 2006, I wrote 19 fics and part of a novel. The part-of-a-novel part won't be coming under consideration here, and neither will two of the 19 fics. One of those missing stories is my contribution to a not-yet-published zine; the other is, to my mind, a completed story, but designed to be part of a trilogy, so I made the decision this summer when I finished it not to put it on the internet until all three were ready to go up together. So since neither of those is available for you to see right now, you won't be that interested in what I think of them.
Overall, then, what to say about this year? I finished the Alpha Centauri series, which is a big, big deal for me, as someone who a) loves that serious in a freaky weird way, and 2) hardly ever finishes anything. This was the year when I utterly failed to write any of the things I tried to write; someday I'm going to get used to the fact that you can't plan for anything in this life -- or I can't, at least. And that's not such a terrible thing, since a lot of the things I didn't try to write, but just wrote anyway, were the things I ended up liking best.
It seems like writing gets harder as I get older and more experienced, which is counterintuitive somehow. But it means more to me, too. I spent a lot of time this year thinking about things like why I do this and how I should be measuring things like "success" and "progress." Writing has always been a deeply communal thing for me -- it's *communication,* the point of it is to start a conversation, which sometimes you start literally, but more often you just hope you've started somehow, at some level, within your readers. But I don't know, this year it's felt like more of a private act, which I'm suspicious of, because my attitude has always been, if you're just writing for yourself, if the reader doesn't matter to you, then leave it on your hard drive where it belongs and don't invite other people in by publishing it on the internet, you know? There's something appalling to me about people who say, in effect, "Here, I'm showing this to you, I'm suggesting it as something you might want to read, but in reality I don't give a fuck what you think, so there."
And I still hold to that opinion, but at the same time, a lot of writing for me this past year has felt like something where the process was more valuable to me than the product necessarily was to you. So...I kind of want to apologize for that. *g* Hopefully this trend won't continue, or I'm in genuine danger of turning into some kind of fucking artist or whatever, and I never wanted to be that.
This is also the first year since, um, 2001 or something that I haven't written any popslash at all, which I guess means it really is a Former Fandom of mine now. I've heard a number of people talk about what effect they think the Popslash Era had on slash fandom as a whole, but I think none of them have really hit on what it meant to me. Popslash crystallized in my mind what fandom is to me, what it gives me, which is a set of skills and a motivation and a kind of open space to dig up the reality that lies behind the obvious. Because just like television has its TV Logic and its genre conventions, things that for better or for worse, we expect to see, following pop culture makes it abundantly clear that we're surrounded all the time by those kind of constructs in the allegedly real world. Everything is television, somehow; 90% of everything we're told or shown by everyone around us is told or shown to us in order to convey someone's sense of what the world is. We have images, iconography, category and allusion and concept. We rarely have access to what is going on within or beneath those things. If you've ever ridden the bus or an airplane or whatever and looked around at all those people and been totally overawed by the realization that every single one of them has an existence that's just as weird and fraught and important to them as yours is to you, then you know what I'm talking about. We see so much, and we know so little. In popslash I experienced that in a literalized way: you buy the magazines, you watch the interviews, you read the blind items, and you go around all the time asking yourself, But what really happened? Did he mean that, or is he just saying it? Can you fake this, or is it real? Reasonably, you assume some of it is real and some is for appearances' sake, and you're always trying to pry apart which is which, and what genuine motives give rise to the ungenuine edifices people construct around themselves. But the thing about RPF is, *you really do know that there really is a real person under there somewhere.* You'll never know that person; it's all deduction and playing the odds and postulating based on observable effects, like some kind of weird branch of theoretical physics, but there is a person to be known or not known.
Well, for me that was always the most important thing about writing fanfiction, even before popslash made me conscious of it: if the narrative of the show is what someone wanted us to see and hear and think about, I want to know what's under it. I've always had this desire to suggest that behind the requirements of the narrative and the industry, behind the conventions of genre, there's a *real universe* and *real people.* It's a game of what if, of course, because all writing is. I look at the screen and I see this character who is the hero of a action-comedy space opera, and I know that everything I see, *everything* I see, I see because writers and actors and directors wanted me to see this. But the game is, what if that's not actually true, what if it just looks that way? What if the reality is, there is a John Sheppard, he's a real person with his own whole life that I only have limited access to, will only ever have limited access to? What can I know about him and how could I know it? And that's how I try to do fandom, and that's how I try to write, and I think that's why it matters to me in a deeper way than just the fun hobby that it also totally is. Because this is where I practice not taking people for granted. This is how I train myself to have empathy, to look around that bus or that airplane and think, holy shit, these people who are just light refracting off my eyeballs are also whole people, real people, and whatever I ever think I know about anything, there's so much more there. Everytime you think you get it, there's a deeper level you can go to, and that's true of everything, and I think I'm better at getting to some of those levels because of what fandom taught me how to do. Popslash mattered to me because it made me realize consciously that everything is canon. We automatically, biologically, sort everything into narrative in our brains. Popslash taught me that there's never a wrong time to ask questions about the narrative, or to wonder what it is I'm not seeing yet.
So I hope I bring that to real life, and I can definitely see some of the ways that I'm bringing that mindset to the fiction I'm writing now. I think it's a good thing, but like I said, it's brought me to this weird place where I feel like as it gets easier to watch people from the outside, it gets harder to engage with them directly, and I have less and less actual, literal dialogue with fandom, which is sad. In fact, it's kind of a New Year's resolution of mine to get away from that, which may conceivably mean that I'll be posting more this year. We'll see.
( 14 comments on 17 stories )
In 2006, I wrote 19 fics and part of a novel. The part-of-a-novel part won't be coming under consideration here, and neither will two of the 19 fics. One of those missing stories is my contribution to a not-yet-published zine; the other is, to my mind, a completed story, but designed to be part of a trilogy, so I made the decision this summer when I finished it not to put it on the internet until all three were ready to go up together. So since neither of those is available for you to see right now, you won't be that interested in what I think of them.
Overall, then, what to say about this year? I finished the Alpha Centauri series, which is a big, big deal for me, as someone who a) loves that serious in a freaky weird way, and 2) hardly ever finishes anything. This was the year when I utterly failed to write any of the things I tried to write; someday I'm going to get used to the fact that you can't plan for anything in this life -- or I can't, at least. And that's not such a terrible thing, since a lot of the things I didn't try to write, but just wrote anyway, were the things I ended up liking best.
It seems like writing gets harder as I get older and more experienced, which is counterintuitive somehow. But it means more to me, too. I spent a lot of time this year thinking about things like why I do this and how I should be measuring things like "success" and "progress." Writing has always been a deeply communal thing for me -- it's *communication,* the point of it is to start a conversation, which sometimes you start literally, but more often you just hope you've started somehow, at some level, within your readers. But I don't know, this year it's felt like more of a private act, which I'm suspicious of, because my attitude has always been, if you're just writing for yourself, if the reader doesn't matter to you, then leave it on your hard drive where it belongs and don't invite other people in by publishing it on the internet, you know? There's something appalling to me about people who say, in effect, "Here, I'm showing this to you, I'm suggesting it as something you might want to read, but in reality I don't give a fuck what you think, so there."
And I still hold to that opinion, but at the same time, a lot of writing for me this past year has felt like something where the process was more valuable to me than the product necessarily was to you. So...I kind of want to apologize for that. *g* Hopefully this trend won't continue, or I'm in genuine danger of turning into some kind of fucking artist or whatever, and I never wanted to be that.
This is also the first year since, um, 2001 or something that I haven't written any popslash at all, which I guess means it really is a Former Fandom of mine now. I've heard a number of people talk about what effect they think the Popslash Era had on slash fandom as a whole, but I think none of them have really hit on what it meant to me. Popslash crystallized in my mind what fandom is to me, what it gives me, which is a set of skills and a motivation and a kind of open space to dig up the reality that lies behind the obvious. Because just like television has its TV Logic and its genre conventions, things that for better or for worse, we expect to see, following pop culture makes it abundantly clear that we're surrounded all the time by those kind of constructs in the allegedly real world. Everything is television, somehow; 90% of everything we're told or shown by everyone around us is told or shown to us in order to convey someone's sense of what the world is. We have images, iconography, category and allusion and concept. We rarely have access to what is going on within or beneath those things. If you've ever ridden the bus or an airplane or whatever and looked around at all those people and been totally overawed by the realization that every single one of them has an existence that's just as weird and fraught and important to them as yours is to you, then you know what I'm talking about. We see so much, and we know so little. In popslash I experienced that in a literalized way: you buy the magazines, you watch the interviews, you read the blind items, and you go around all the time asking yourself, But what really happened? Did he mean that, or is he just saying it? Can you fake this, or is it real? Reasonably, you assume some of it is real and some is for appearances' sake, and you're always trying to pry apart which is which, and what genuine motives give rise to the ungenuine edifices people construct around themselves. But the thing about RPF is, *you really do know that there really is a real person under there somewhere.* You'll never know that person; it's all deduction and playing the odds and postulating based on observable effects, like some kind of weird branch of theoretical physics, but there is a person to be known or not known.
Well, for me that was always the most important thing about writing fanfiction, even before popslash made me conscious of it: if the narrative of the show is what someone wanted us to see and hear and think about, I want to know what's under it. I've always had this desire to suggest that behind the requirements of the narrative and the industry, behind the conventions of genre, there's a *real universe* and *real people.* It's a game of what if, of course, because all writing is. I look at the screen and I see this character who is the hero of a action-comedy space opera, and I know that everything I see, *everything* I see, I see because writers and actors and directors wanted me to see this. But the game is, what if that's not actually true, what if it just looks that way? What if the reality is, there is a John Sheppard, he's a real person with his own whole life that I only have limited access to, will only ever have limited access to? What can I know about him and how could I know it? And that's how I try to do fandom, and that's how I try to write, and I think that's why it matters to me in a deeper way than just the fun hobby that it also totally is. Because this is where I practice not taking people for granted. This is how I train myself to have empathy, to look around that bus or that airplane and think, holy shit, these people who are just light refracting off my eyeballs are also whole people, real people, and whatever I ever think I know about anything, there's so much more there. Everytime you think you get it, there's a deeper level you can go to, and that's true of everything, and I think I'm better at getting to some of those levels because of what fandom taught me how to do. Popslash mattered to me because it made me realize consciously that everything is canon. We automatically, biologically, sort everything into narrative in our brains. Popslash taught me that there's never a wrong time to ask questions about the narrative, or to wonder what it is I'm not seeing yet.
So I hope I bring that to real life, and I can definitely see some of the ways that I'm bringing that mindset to the fiction I'm writing now. I think it's a good thing, but like I said, it's brought me to this weird place where I feel like as it gets easier to watch people from the outside, it gets harder to engage with them directly, and I have less and less actual, literal dialogue with fandom, which is sad. In fact, it's kind of a New Year's resolution of mine to get away from that, which may conceivably mean that I'll be posting more this year. We'll see.
( 14 comments on 17 stories )
