a fool's musings

Fool, said my muse to me, look in thy heart and write...

Warning: Adult Content achromatic unfinished fic graveyard recs journal new stuff recent stuff my back pages January 2004 December 2003 November 2003 October 2003 September 2003 August 2003 July 2003 June 2003 May 2003 April 2003 March 2003 February 2003 January 2003 December 2002 November 2002 October 2002 September 2002 August 2002 July 2002 June 2002 May 2002 April 2002 March 2002 February 2002 January 2002 December 2001 November 2001 the five Ws, or, all about me profile e-mail victoria my livejournal the original P&R comments current mood: "pathological and unbalanced" Items of Interest People LiveJournal folks Baraita bishclone claritylit Jintian Kat Allison Kit Mason metablog mix-tapes Neil Gaiman Nestra Sarah T. Seema Shrift Sundry Mourning zendom Music Walk On - U2 Thunder Road - Bruce Springsteen If I Can't Change Your Mind - Sugar Sick of Myself - Matthew Sweet Town Called Malice - The Jam One - U2 The Space Between - DMB Books Lord of the Rings Catch-22 The Neely Trilogy Absalom! Absalom! Possession: A Romance Foucault's Pendulum Dreamhouse LA Confidential I Capture the Castle Sandman Waking the Moon Shows Angel Buffy the Vampire Slayer (in reruns) Alias West Wing The Simpsons webrings < ? fanfiction ! > < ? writers ! > diaryreviews.diaryland.com NYC Bloggers Comments by Haloscan.com all links, if I haven't screwed up somehow, should open in a new browser window

2002-03-26 - 11:54 p.m. and they lived happily ever after... I ran into an old friend on the subway on the way home from work tonight. I hadn't seen her in about a year, but it seems we work about a block from each other now. How cool is that? So I will definitely be dropping her a line to go to lunch in the near future. ~*~ Something that makes me go, "Squee!" Just bookmarked charisma-carpenter.com so I can make all the Cordy icons I want. Yeah. Squee! I still have to make a Brat!Lana one, with her in her underwear. What can I say? I like sexy-chick icons to stand in for me. ~*~ Quote for the night, from my darling beta Jen [as opposed to Jenn, who is also darling, about whom I will be speaking momentarily *g*]: She's an arrogant bint who tries to pimp her fic by playing at litcrit. BAH. Doesn't matter who she's talking about. Just love the pithy dismissal of pretension. ~*~ Now, onto Jenn [with two "n"s. *g* Love her.]. She writes: I want romance. I want the entire damned sunset with pink clouds and glowing golden-purple in the sky that's worth a page of description. I want a damned schmoopy-pop soundtrack (Thank you Lenny, damn you) and bunnies and a fucking horse if that's what it takes. And protestations of eternal love and God, God, God, it's like I'm channeling Judith McNaught or something. I want to write this so badly I keep catching myself DOING it and have to stop myself. Because it's the one of my worst habits as a writer. [...] The second, the dangerous one, is my undying need for happy ever after. And I mean HAPPY, like a pornographic Disney flick. I'm talking the stars themselves want to sing of this eternal love. It's always there, moving just below the surface, and it's really, really hard to break that habit of wanting it so badly. [...] It's not just that I don't like sad endings. It's that I wnat to FIX them. And as the writer, I CAN, I mean, I WROTE it. I know what I'm doing most of the time. And that's--it's this constnat battle between my romanticism and my realism and my ego all three. And here's the thing--darkfic? I don't care if the two main characters kill off the entire cast whiel dancing to Sting's Worst Hits. They're together, they're in love, they're HAPPY. See, I totally get this. I will tell you, very loudly and quite frequently in fact, that I do not write angst. I'm in the ficcing business because I want a happy ending for my couples. I mean, their lives [whatever that means for fictional characters] are pretty fucked up as it is. Why in flamin' hell am I going to make them worse? I don't ignore the problems. I don't ignore Clark and Lex's future. In fact, that future break is probably what makes them so attractive to me. Otherwise, I'd be writing ChLark or ChLex. Because I'm not a slasher by inclination. I mean, I like slash and I write it, but it's not my first choice for a pairing I'm going to devote myself to, so there's got to be something pretty fucking powerful to get me there. Clark/Lex. Xavier/Magneto. Yeah. But I like to see them overcome the problems and be happy afterwards. What fun is it to put them through sheer hell and then have them fucking miserable afterwards? I mean, they deserve a little happiness. At least, that's how I look at it. If you can eke out some joy in a world where you're never going to touch another human being skin-on-skin without damaging them, dammit, you should. I look at it as my purpose, as a fanfic writer, to provide that joy where Marvel or DC or Mutant Enemy can't or won't. As for what Jenn says, do you know how *hard* it is for me not to fix the one or two sad endings I've come up with? Untouchable Face is pretty much me fixing Girl of His Dreams. Just My Imagination was supposed to stand alone, but I had to go and write a Rogue POV, and someday I might write the final story in that trilogy, where she tracks him down in Calgary and they finally get it together. I've resisted mightily the urge to sequelize The Nature of Everything, with Rogue telling Logan to get a clue and love her while he can. Because really, that's all any of us can do, right? Love someone to the best of our abilities while we can. So I like my happy endings, and I continue to write them and defend them against people who consider them bourgeois or outré or declassé or whatever. But, as always, there are stories that require a not-happy, or a sad ending. And I do distinguish between not-happy, not-unhappy, and sad. To give a story that should have a sad ending a happy one is bad writing. Speaking of which, I read a story today... it *wanted* so badly to be a good story. And *I* wanted so badly for it to be good. But it wasn't. Sigh. And I don't know, I could see/feel/hear/practically fucking taste the good story aching to burst free of the punctuation errors and the rushed, almost forced conclusion, as well as the over-the-top extra helping of angst. But damn, it could be *so* good. I don't know the author well enough to send her a detailed critique, and I don't have the time or the inclination to beta for her, especially not if her stuff needs a lot of work, but damn... Does anyone else ever feel responsible like this? That I *should* write to her and *should* try to get her to improve in these technical areas, so that the story could be good? And is it sheer laziness on my part that I don't? Fear of being misinterpreted and accused of flaming? Once bitten, twice shy and all that. I mean, there are some people I wouldn't piss on if they were on fire, from the way they react to genuine offers of help, you know? Ah, well. There was something else I wanted to say... Oh yes, two things: 1. Big ol' fic snip in the LJ, *plus* a new Charisma icon. 2. Added Scalpel to The Muse's Fool. That is all. ~victoria [current mood: ] [current music: ] [random quote: ] ~*~ 2002-03-26 - 4:01 p.m. lies, damn lies, and statistics Still collating... Got some nice Magneto-fic lovin', so I'm cool. Was perusing my site stats for the majority of the month of March, up to yesterday. I don't know remember what the ratio is, but dear god, I am in no *way* getting 1 feedback for every 40 visitors to my site. I'm not even getting 1 feedback for every 1000 visitors. From 3/1/02 - 3/25/02, 2640 people visited the front page of the site. Do you know how much feedback I've gotten from the website in the month of March (that I can track back to the website, anyway)? One. That's right. One email. This is not a whinge about feedback. I get love. Of course I want more, but I'm not complaining. I'm just looking at the numbers. I'm so not a numbers girl, but I used to do financial analysis, and if I didn't have such a crapulicious sinus headache, I'd probably try to do some figuring... 782 visited the X-Men Stories Index and 343 visitied the Other Stories Index. Of the stories, there were a total of 4491 hits on 90 different stories. One feedback email. So, you know, this is why I love my stats. Because it makes me feel better, makes me feel like someone is reading the stories, is coming and looking around. Because I know it's not all me. *g* I mean, I look around, I reread, but I spent far more time looking at *other* people's sites. And really, even if only 91 of those people actually read any of the stories they clicked on, that's good. That's great. That's freaking amazing when I think about it. 90 people I don't know from Adam, or 90 people I've met on line somewhere or another -- they're still *reading* what I've written. (And yes, I'm aware that the number of *people* is different from the number of *hits*, thanks.) And that makes me tingly. Even if they don't send feedback. And I'm guilty, too. I rarely hit the email button anymore to send feedback from someone's site. Most of the fic I read, I read on mailing lists, in my inbox or at the Yahoo site. So generally, by the time it gets up on a site, I'm rereading, and have already sent feedback if I was going to. That may change, considering how far behind I am on reading Smallville fic. I may just haunt the SSA for a while, to catch up, and delete all the mail in my CLex folder. I'm not sure yet. I've also got a ton of WW fic to read, and a small handful of X-Fic that I've been saving for a rainy day. It appears that rainy day has arrived, because the X-Fic has mostly dried up lately. Plus, you know, Magneto... It's possible he's getting chatty. Maybe he'll tell me all about how he and Charles broke up. I can't help but make the leap from CLex to X/M. Beth and I were talking about it last night. Dot says it's a big cliche, but I like the true love/mortal enemy paradigm. The angst is so much more *meaningful* that way. And McKellen and Stewart, those golden throated men arguing in their hushed velvet tones about wine and books and politics and philosophy... how could you not love them? Though I have many, many L/R fics to finish. Let's see... the abridged WIP list: Consumption Amnesiac!Rogue Night of the Dead Living No Day But Today (2 versions *g*) Caliper Heh. I almost typed Time's Fool, until I remembered I finished it. *g* Day's Hard Light Love's Compass And, in SV: Metropolitan Crossing Paths When We Were Young How's that? I know this entry is disjointed. I got interrupted in the middle and had to sort of figure out what the hell I was trying to say with all the numbers that are essentially meaningless, because numbers don't lie, but they don't tell the truth either. They're just numbers, and you can make them say anything you like, when you get right down to it. So, back to collating. Questions? Comments? Brilliant perceptions? You know what to do. *g* ~victoria [current mood: headachey] [current music: Pride and Joy - Stevie Ray Vaughan] [current mood: ] [current music: ] [random quote: ] ~*~ 2002-03-26 - 10:30 a.m. You've got style, that's what all the girls say Okay, all you people not posting stories or updating your diaries, etc.? You're falling down on the job. You're supposed to be entertaining me, and I'm not entertained. I'm so bored, I'm considering actually, you know, doing *work* instead of goofing off. And since that work consists mainly of collating a shitload of papers for the auditors (stupid auditors), you must know I'm desperate. Also, I fucking hate Yahoo. But you knew that. You probably hate them, too. Posted the Magneto fic. Waiting for the love. *snerk* A couple people have suggested various writing exercises to me, as a way of 1. breaking my writer's block on the longer fics, 2. improving my skills, both in plotting and in endings. I'm probably going to take the advice, but I admit to being highly skeptical of most writing exercises. I need to get over that, but I just can't seem to bring myself to believe that they're actually *helpful*. I'm not sure if the skepticism stems from my egotism (egoism?) or what. I've tried style experiments, which all end up sounding the same. I think that means I've got a style, whether I'm aware of it or not. *g* Shall I list off the fics that are written in this style? Envious Moon, The Space Between, He Knows, Kindness Falls Like Rain, One Sure Thing, Someone Else and Touch of Frost. Okay, Touch of Frost is different, because I tried to go with the fairy-tale type narration, but the others? *snerk* My idea of a "style experiment" seems to be writing in present tense. I'm not quite sure what that says about me. One Sure Thing was written to be deliberately elliptical. The only other major stylistic departures - all dialogue fic (Palm Springs Conversation), say, or the multiple POVs (Parallax)- yes, I did want to see if I could work with those techniques, but to me, that's different from *style*. The stream-of-consciousness diary entries in Very Sickness were conscious stylistic choices - I was going for Faulknerian, which I thought was an apt style for the Southern-Girl-gone-mad vibe of the story. I mean, who *else* would you think of for southern gothic? *g* Okay, I also heart Faulkner with big woobie hearts, so *of course* I want to go all out and try to write like him occasionally. I mean, the man's use of language... *swoon* I can't recall if I've written about this before, but there are some writers, like Faulkner, who embrace the language and everything in it. Faulkner, Shakespeare, Homer, guys who *made up* words if they couldn't find the one they wanted. Then there are writers like Virgil, Dante, Hemingway, who place every word *just so* and limit their lexicon, using words like scalpels and building stories that are structurally the most amazing things. And while I'd like to marry those two types of writing in my own, I tend toward the latter - spare, pared down, avoiding using certain words or phrases because they seem too lush or too out of place or too *something*. So my experiments in style tend to be me trying to be more -- god, how sad is it that the word that comes to mind is "effulgent"? I don't want to be associated with William the Bloody Awful Poet. *snerk* I try to be lyrical. I think in certain circumstances, I manage it. I know my preferred mood to create, when I write, is a sort of silver-gilt melancholy. Look at the Nightswimming stories to see what I mean. I come back to that mood time and again. I don't know if that's twee or what. It's certainly a delicate balance between exquisite melancholy and annoying mopery. I'm trying to walk that line, but I'm not sure I always manage it. I do find that my work in shorter fics is usually tighter, better, stronger. Because I don't have time to get tangled up in plot or meander off on tangents that aren't relevant. And I don't have time to rush the end, because it's just... there. Are there stylists in the fic world that I envy? Absolutely. Elizabeth. Molly. Jenn. Jenny-O for certain things. Te, sometimes, though I think her stylistic tics sometimes get in the way of the story. Ditto Jane St Clair. I guess I sometimes see style as an *impediment* and really, I shouldn't. It's just another vehicle to carry the story. But I get so wrapped up in it - is it a good style? Will other people like it? Do I like it? Is it "cool"? Is it "bleeding edge"? - that I forget that the style needs to serve the story. If it doesn't, it's just an annoyance. Form should follow function. Hmm... In other news, wasn't planning on seeing Sorority Boys, mainly because it's been done, and I don't think any modern-day comedy is going to top Some Like It Hot, the apotheosis of straight-men-disguised-as-women movies. But after reading Beth's review, I don't think I'm even going to spend the $4 to rent it when it comes out on DVD. I'd rather watch "Bosom Buddies" on TVLand, Michael Rosenbaum's hotness notwithstanding. If you've got something to say about this, or anything else in this diary, go here. ~victoria [current mood: awake] [current music: Layla - Derek and the Dominoes] [current mood: ] [current music: ] [random quote: ] ~*~ 2002-03-25 - 10:15 p.m. Scalpel Here's the mini-Magneto fic I wrote in response to Khaki's latest first line challenge. Unbetaed. All errors are mine. Yada, yada. Opinions are, as always, welcome, nay craved. *g* *** Scalpel The doctor's blood dripped from the counter like spilled milk. Erik smiled thinly at his captors. They had strapped him down, but he could still fight back. He didn't need his hands to make the needles bend, the scalpels dance to his tune. Since the day they'd separated him from his parents, he'd known he was different from them. Weak, they were, and easily cowed. He was special. He could fight back. He couldn't quite explain *how* he manipulated the metal, why it obeyed his commands, or the sheer joy that flooded him upon doing it. He just knew that he could, and so he did. The doctor spat something at the guards, who approached warily. They had beaten him every day for the past three weeks. But he had beaten them, too, made their guns useless. And without their guns, without their certainty in their own superiority, they were nothing; bullies who'd been frightened by his mastery of their weapons. He never let them see his fear; he recognized that that would only make them strong again, and he couldn't afford that. He knew that his time with the upper hand was dribbling away, that each day they were learning more about him, and soon they would realize that he could only control metal, and glass implements would appear to tease out his secrets. But they didn't know that yet. They still approached with needles to drug him, and scalpels to cut him open, to see what made him different from the other inmates, whom they treated like refuse. He was determined that they wouldn't learn, wouldn't pry the enigma of his powers from his mind or from his flesh. The guards held him down, their hands imprinting fresh bruises on his already battered body, and the doctor, the cut on his hand now bandaged, approached with a grim smile on his face. Two of the guards grabbed Erik's head, forcing his mouth open and holding his nose shut. The doctor dropped a large pill down his throat and he gagged, trying not to swallow, not to let them win this round. The soldiers clamped his mouth shut and wouldn't let him breathe. Finally, lack of air made him give in. As he waited for the pill to take effect, he narrowed his eyes and quietly, with great concentration as his vision blurred and his limbs grew heavy, bent all the instruments on the counter. The last thing he saw, as his eyes fluttered closed, was the doctor's frown as he realized his scalpels and specula were useless, twisted into one giant heap of scrap metal. His mind was his scalpel, and he planned his cuts well, determined to survive at any cost. ~fin~ ~victoria [current mood: ] [current music: ] [random quote: ] ~*~ previous - next DiaryLand Disclaimer: Reading this diary is not required by law. If you do not like or agree with the contents herein, or find them to be offensive on more than one occasion, please go elsewhere and don't come back. 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