michelel72

I've seen this from a few other writers, and I figure, why not? Meme Meta discussion format borrowed from frith_in_thorns.

( 2009 Fanfic Review (aka I'm Wordy, Y'all!) )

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I'll admit, I was a little wary of the SGA Secret Santa fic exchange. Folk who know me personally know that I have an aversion to Christmas in general, for a variety of reasons; I don't ask anyone else not to celebrate it, but I do require that they not force me to do so.

(ETA: That doesn't mean I'm at all ungrateful or resentful of folk who've given me small tokens! If part of your celebration includes little tokens of friendship, such as LJ gifts or holiday cards, that's totally cool and I do appreciate it, and I hope I don't come across as a bad friend for not doing the same or not always responding in a timely manner ....)

What's that got to do with fic? Well, one of the more common narrative tropes I've seen is the redeeming of the Grinch/Scrooge figure. That's problematic anyway, because the terms have been appropriated and mutated by the enforced-celebration crowd. In the original text, the Grinch aggressively tried to destroy the celebration of others, not politely decline to participate or ask that the celebrants keep their celebration to themselves; Scrooge lacked charity and empathy in total and took it out on those around him, though granted the tool for that was Christmas.

In too many shows, books, films, and fics, I've seen the one character who doesn't actively participate shunned as a Scrooge or Grinch and then harrassed ceaselessly until he or she caves, dons the Party Rictus, and marches along. One of us. That isn't fun or rewarding; that's fucking annoying, and it makes me resent Christmas (as well as "Oh, no, you don't have to celebrate Christmas precisely, don't be silly, but you still have to embrace and epitomize the spirit of a winter party with specific attributes that might as well be Christmas!") all the more. In SGA fics, I've seen this take form with Rodney McKay, the character who for whatever reason I most prefer, being nagged and harrassed and ceaselessly badgered to confess his Secret Childhood Trauma so that he'll stop being such a meanie to everyone for disrupting or even halting work for a good month or so.

(This post, found via metaquotes, expresses at least a part of this quite well, though the direction is different.)

All this is to say that I've been pleasantly surprised by the exchange this year. I haven't read all the stories, mind, but I don't think I've yet seen a single one that fits this trope. The one exception I can remember had John and Rodney competing to show the most "Christmas spirit" and showed just how horrifying that was for the bystanders.

It's actually quite refreshing. I am relieved and pleasantly surprised.

(One story — not in the exchange, but run across by me at about the same time — even had Rodney sympathetically allowing reasonable displays and standing up to those who mocked him as a Grinch for placing any limits. Most folks in the labs wore bells and snickered to find Rodney's mood and concentration decaying as they jingled, jingled, jingled all day long; rather than shipping them all to the mainland as I would have done after only a day of ceaseless tintinnabulation, he crafted silencers for the bells, telling everyone they could keep their bells but simply had to muffle them in the lab. If I hadn't loved him before that point, I would have loved him for that.)

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So. I don't do memes. It's in my contract.

But ... I like to do fanfic meta, whether reading it or providing it. And thanks to friendshipper, I've become aware of a fanfic meta ... thing ... that's making the rounds:

Pick a paragraph (or any passage 500-1000 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

I can't promise anything quite that exciting, and I've only written four stories, but I'm willing to play. Over in friendshipper's journal, folk are posting snippets along with their particular reasons for selecting that passage or questions they have about it, which seems like a very useful way to spark thought processes. So if you have any such questions or interest, please feel free to pose such questions here.

I consider this journal to be my primary fiction location, but my filtered Dreamwidth account is the easiest way to see all my stories at a glance.

So. This writing thing.

::points to icon::

I added a little under a thousand words to one story. That's it. One story that I'm not particularly liking and am stuck on to boot, dammit. (I know the scene that comes next-ish, if I can find a way to link to it, and then ... no clue. How the hell you get stuck writing a post-Trinity story, I do not know. It's a formula! That's almost the point! And yet I don't know how to resolve the stupid thing! And I kinda hate the omniscient-narrator interludes yet can't figure how to convey what I need to without them! Gah!)

I'm contrarian; I know that. Tell me I have to do something and I dig in my heels. But ... I was actually enjoying this stuff.

... I blame this particular story. Not my lame-ass self, not at all. Nope.

Plan: slap in scene-to-come, unconnected; go back to the "okay" story this one diverted me from, or the fun story that one diverted me from. With, um, no commitments. At all. La la la, just noodling here, not checking wordcounts, no, not me ....

Anybody out there interested in being the beta for a grim little story? Headers below. (I'm not in love with the title, incidentally.) If so, comment here and we can arrange email of my MSWord document or access to a locked html or whatever is easiest.

If no one here is interested, I may go check sga_beta or may just post with no beta, despite my convictions on that matter. :> -- M

ETA: Two lovely volunteers who have my thanks. Yay!

( Headers )

So, as I've previously mentioned (at great length), I'm long-winded. (See what I did there?) When it comes to prose, I've never been able to convey much of anything in short form. I just crossed 15k words of mixed summary-and-scenes for a sequel I never meant to write -- to an 18.5k story I never meant to write, either!

I tried short form, I figured, and failed.

And yet I'm writing drabbles now. Like, more than one; like, old-school hardcore exactly-100-words drabbles. Pretentious as all get-out, mind, but ... they're short! Yay me!

Short post is short.

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So I'm actually used to my mp3 player seeming to read my mind -- such as the fact that it played the Genesis song "Cinema Show", out of almost 7000 tracks, at me yesterday, when I had just read a genderswap SGA fic that mentioned Teresias the night before. ("Take a little trip back / with Father Tiresias ....")

I didn't know my muse was in on the action.

I posted my second fanfic, a tag (of sorts) to the SG-1 episode "48 Hours", last Tuesday. I'd been working on it for ... weeks? months? ... but it really grabbed me recently and made me finish it.

Guess what episode redial_the_gate (an SG-1 coordinated-rewatch community) happened to reach this past Friday?

I seriously don't think there's any way I knew the schedule (of ten seasons), even subconsciously, so ... weird, man. Weird.

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So, I don't really like reading stuff at ff.net, because the whole chapter thing drives me up a tree (among other reasons). I'd rather read (and bookmark) stories in a single page. Yet, thanks to LJ's limits, I had to post my own story in three parts. Oh, the injustice of it all!

Anyway. Someday I'll have my very own website, but this is not that day. However, now that I have a Dreamwidth account, I was able to put the story into a single page: Displacement. (Yeah, I renamed it from "The Longest Three-Week Day" because I hated that title ... but it's still referenced in all copies because it seemed rude to remove it completely weeks after "publication".) So, um, there you go, anyone who's interested.

In other Rodney/Donna news: I did have a sketchy idea for a sequel, but the whole thing was just AMTDI, and I didn't want to write that. I think I've figured out what I want to do with it, though. It's a slight little thing (says the woman who got her "48 Hours"-based story's anticipated wordcount wrong by two orders of magnitude), but it might be fun. Whenever I write it, that is -- which won't be soon, I don't think. Not with this full-time job thing I have. But having a storyline is at least progress, so yay!

In other vaguely related news: Surfing delicious.com for links to one's own identity is a trip.

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I'm new to this fanfic thing and especially to this writing-fanfic thing, and it's a little daunting. I'm not the most astute at reading social cues, so I tend to worry I'm Doing It Wrong.

( A few little fandom-etiquette worries ... )

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Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to our live coverage. Our next category is "michelel72's First Completed Draft, Fiction Division". Let's review the nominees:

JonChron: Near Point, 149,783 words, last edited 10/2006
SGA FanFiction: Headhunters: 10,810 words since November 11
SGA FanFiction: Power: 6,181 words since December 14
SGA FanFiction: Interface: 2,208 words since December 27
SGA FanFiction: The Mad Mechanic: 19,029 words since December 24

That's quite a ... diverse collection, isn't it, folks? Like Liz Taylor's husbands! Am I right?

Ahem. Too soon? Yes, well ... yes, let's have the envelope please.

And the winner is ... SGA/DW Crossover FanFiction: The Longest Three-Week Day! Let's ... wait, what? What is this? 17k words since January 1, whatever, I didn't -- a crossover romance? How did this get in here? Where are the accountants -- what do you mean we couldn't afford Pricewaterhouse this year? Quit playing the theme, you idiots, this is clearly some kind of mistake -- stop screaming, you silly woman, and give that statue back, give it -- ow! Quit hitting me with the statue you've just stolen! Where's security? Wait, why are you taking me away, it's her, she rigged the results, she has violated the sanctity of the -- mmmmmf!

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