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

02.09.03 - 1:23 p.m. baby and bracelet Congratulations to Dot and Steve, on the birth of their daughter Madeleine. *squee* Baby girl clothes are the most fun to buy. ~*~ My Movado bracelet broke this morning. I woke up and it was scattered in pieces in the bed, all the little gold and lapis beads rolling around. I hope I managed to get them all when I gathered it up. ::sniff:: I guess I really should have not worn it all day and all night, in the shower, ocean, pool, etc. I'm feeling all forlorn about it. Ah me... Have to find a jeweller now. Sigh. ~victoria link [current mood: forlorn] [current music: television in the background] [random quote: Like who would have thought that dolphins could go bad and that fish were magnetic? Not me, no sir, not me. ~The Tick] ~*~ 02.08.03 - 2:56 p.m. blonde on blonde Finished my NYS taxes, dad checked over both the fed and state worksheets, and I'm getting money back. Woohoo! Love that. Quick thoughts on "Soulless" and this week's GG ep up in the LJ. I've been very bored with all my stories this week. I am working on Han/Logan, and possibly the actual sex scene for the silly LotR parody. But I can't spend all afternoon on the computer. Sigh. I had Nothing Like the Sun open yesterday, and the middle parts are just not happening. I mean, sure it's mostly just minor variations on Hr/D sex, but it has to build to that first scene, where their relationship is actually more affectionate adversaries than stone enemies. Then I had Liar's Poker open and again, the middle part needs writing, with Logan being mean and Rogue being patient, like a spider with a fly - the fly can do everything it pleases to make the spider find it unattractive, but it never works. The spider always wins in the end. And Logan hasn't realized yet that he's the fly, not the spider. And I have all these thoughts about showing v. telling, and how telling sometimes is a fine technique if you can make it work for you (heresy, I know). Also a piece of feedback on Fistful of Dollars, as well as a major faux pas on my part while writing it (obviously corrected in the final, posted version) has made me reconsider Logan/Rogue and my assumptions about it, and also how people not in the fandom view the pairing (and I don't mean the rabid, "ooh, it's sick and wrong" types. I mean the people looking at it with fresh eyes, who never thought of it before, not being X-Men fans) see it, with the dysfunction and the kink built in, no work needed by author. But since I don't have time for that, I give you this, and then I'm going to go weep at how I'll never write a description like this, and I should stop writing altogether because he says everything I ever wanted to say: There are blondes and blondes and it is almost a joke word nowadays. All blondes have their points, except perhaps the metallic ones who are as blond as a Zulu under the bleach and as to disposition as soft as a sidewalk. There is the cute blonde who cheeps and twitters, and the big statuesque blonde who straight-arms you with an ice-blue glare. There is the blonde who gives you the up-from-under look and smells lovely and shimmers and hangs on your arm and is always very very tired when you take her home. She makes that helpless gesture and has that goddamned headache and you would like to slug her except that you are glad you found out about the headache before you invested too much time and money and hope in her. Because the headache will always be there, a weapon that never wears out and is as deadly as the bravo's rapier or Lucrezia's poison vial. There is the soft and willing and alcoholic blonde who doesn't care what she wears as long as it is mink or where she goes as along as it is the Starlight Room and there is plenty of dry champagne. There is the small perky blonde who is a little pal and wants to pay her own way and is full of sunshine and common sense and knows judo from the ground up and can toss a truck driver over her shoulder without missing more than one sentence out of the editorial in the Saturday Review. There is the pale, pale blonde with anemia of some non-fatal but incurable type. She is very languid and very shadowy and she speaks softly out of nowhere and you can't lay a finger on her because in the first place you don't want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original, or Kafka or Kierkegaard or studying Provençal. She adores music and can tell you which of the six bass viols came in a quarter of a beat too late. I hear Toscanini can also. That makes two of them. And lastly there is the gorgeous show piece who will outlast three kingpin racketeers and then marry a couple of millionaires at a million a head and end up with a pale rose villa at Cap Antibes, an Alfa-Romeo town car complete with pilot and co-pilot, and a stable of shopworn aristocrats, all of whom she will treat with the affectionate absent-mindedness of an elderly duke saying goodnight to his butler. The dream across the way was none of these, not even of that kind of world. She was unclassifiable, as remote and clear as mountain water, as elusive as its color. Sigh. That's Chandler writing Marlowe describing Eileen Wade in The Long Goodbye. On the one hand, why did I not read this book sooner? (heh. when I first read Absalom, Absalom, I asked the same question.) On the other, it's probably a good thing I didn't, or I'd never have had the nerve to try a noir of my own. ~victoria link [current mood: inadequate] [current music: silence] [random quote: \"There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.\" ~The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler] ~*~ 02.07.03 - 2:03 p.m. soooo fracking bored so bored. DYING of boredom. gah. [current mood: ] [current music: ] [random quote: ] ~*~ 02.07.03 - 11:29 a.m. it ain't karaoke LJ is being all wonky again, so here is the entry I wrote this morning on this year's CBFFAs (containing my usual schtick on awards), even though it's not showing up on my LJ anymore. Grrr.... Continuing the discussion from yesterday, Caroline Baker has an interesting post on the whole badfic/improving discussion that’s sprung up again. This was my response in her comments (edited to correct some typos and to clarify some things): You make some interesting points, but I don't think the karaoke comparison holds up - people who sing karaoke don't walk around afterward and say, "Tell me what you think or I won't sing again!" or even just, "Please tell me what you think!" while I've never seen a story posted to a list that didn't include a request for feedback in some way or another. If someone is going to request a response from me (and that's what that is), that implies that they want me to spend my time on what they've done, in order for me to give the response they've requested. Now, there are many, many reasons I may not spend the time (not having much to spend on reading *any* fanfic would be number one), but the fact of the matter is, the request is being made, and as such, it seems to me that it's the responsibility of the person making the request to make sure that whatever it is they want me to comment on and, not to put too fine a point on it, praise (and come on, we all know that at some level, that whether it says "Feedback: Is gratefully accepted" or "Pls R&R or I wont rite anymoer!!!!11", the author is hoping for praise), had better make it worth my while, or at least as pleasant as they possibly can. And for *me*, pleasant includes putting two lines between paragraphs, using correct punctuation most of the time, making the effort to spell the characters' names right, and generally to produce the best the person can. And if they can't be bothered, neither can I. Is it a disconnect in philosophy? Sure it is. I honestly cannot conceive of not trying to improve at doing something I love. Of course, if I consistently suck at something, I stop doing it, because it's no fun for me to be bad at things. I don't like it, and choose not to do things I'm not good at and which would take incredible amounts of work for me to even become decent at (like drawing, or playing the piano or the flute, both of which I've struggled with and failed to even become mediocre at). So if writing with a grasp of the basics of written English is such a chore for some people, I can understand why they don't want to be bothered. What I don't understand is why they feel the need to subject the rest of us to their stuff. Because I would never force anyone to listen to me play the piano (well, now I wouldn't. My parents weren't so kind, back in the day) or to have to critique a drawing I did (sadly, my 6yo nephew has surpassed me in this area already. I see a bright future for him in the arts). I've been upfront about my attitude, and if the people who want to use 'it's just a hobby' as their justification can't deal with it, then that's their problem. I'm not reading their fic; they don't have to read mine. And man, this sounds pissy, and I'm not pissy at Caro, I just don't see why people like me, who feel that a basic standard of communication is desirable, should have to work to understand this mindset while the 'just for fun' people get to go around calling us elitist bitches who are just ruining their fun. (Not that I deny being an elitist or a bitch. It's just that reading their idea of fun often strikes me as torture, pure and simple.) As for the question of whether I would spend the time to correct errors in a piece of fanfic that's going to be bad regardless of how technically correct it is, for the most part, I wouldn't. There was a time when I did. But having to correct the same errors over and over again, where the person evinces no learning curve whatsoever and no *desire* to learn because "Oh, vic'll fix it in beta" - no. Not anymore. The people who *do* manage to grit their teeth and soldier on helping people who need it, well, I have the utmost respect for them. The bottom line for me is, writing is a form of communication. By telling a story, you are, you know TRYING TO TELL ME SOMETHING. You should do so in the clearest and best way possible, and following the rules of grammar and punctuation in whatever language in which you're writing seems to me to be the most basic place to begin. I mean, you wouldn't write a symphony and expect people to fall all over you as the next Mozart if you never learned to use musical notation, would you? (and please, don't bring up people like Joss Whedon - he had Chris Beck working with him, so I trust that any music he composed was written out in standard musical notation, even if he didn't do it himself.) Bonibaru has an interesting response as well, focusing on beta reading. And she’s apparently much healthier about accepting crit than I am. ~victoria link [current mood: pugnacious <- my new favorite mood] [current music: I'll Never Tell - NB & EC] [random quote: The storm is breaking or so it seems. We're too young to reason and too grown up to dream.] ~*~ 02.06.03 - 4:47 p.m. crit and credibility New favorite phrase: Amorous necrophiliac possums. I'd like to say it's Pete's fault, but I'm afraid I'm equally to blame. 'Cause we know comedy gold when we see it. ::hugs diary:: I'm so glad I have this diary, since LJ is now implementing posting limits. Not that I've ever posted 20 times in one day, nor will I, unless I'm drunk and crazy, and let's face it, if I'm drunk and crazy, I hope to hell I'll have more exciting things to do than spam my livejournal. I've discovered that my no-longer-secret love of office supplies is shared by many others. I'm so glad I'm not alone. So cofax has an entry on reviewing v. reccing, and public crit and such. Very interesting stuff. Coupled with Ingrid's post on badfic and helping newbies has got me thinking on a few things. Edited for clarification: This is a combination of things I wrote in cofax's comments and in Ingrid's comments: FBF: A recomendation [sic] is an opinion. A review is a critque. cofax: Now that's an interesting distinction, and one that isn't often made around here. I tend to mush them together on the blog and on the recs page, but you're right. The Rec is made as a service to the fandom at large, as a pointer to something I find entertaining. The critique is an analytical exercise for myself, and perhaps a service for the writer or other writers who may find it interesting or informative. Hmmm... Now that's interesting to me. A critique, to me, is for the writer, and should probably be sent privately, or done on a list with a workshoppy environment, unless the writer says she doesn't mind public critiquing. A review is like a critique, but for the readers. "Here's why you should read this, even though X didn't work for me, the greatness of Y more than offset that. The beginning was a little slow, but stick with it, the ending more than makes up for it, yada yada." A rec is like a review, but even more personal: "*I* liked this story bunches and think everyone should read it." You may say, "Here are some caveats, but I liked it so much I didn't care," which I generally only do when the story is in need of a fierce line edit or has some other technical problem that, usually due to the genre I can overlook. What I mean is, I only rec humorous stories this way, because if someone makes me laugh so hard I fall off the bed and wake the dog ::coughBagenderscough::, I’m going to forgive the punctuation nightmares and the typos. Whereas a serious story? Not as much leeway. Most of the egregious errors could just be avoided if people used (un)common sense. Spell check. Put two spaces between paragraphs. Make sure you get people's names right. Some people are gonna nail characterization right out of the box and some will never nail it, and the technical writing skills (from simple punctuation to not breaking POV to choosing tense etc) can be taught and polished, but some of the mistakes are due to pure laziness and to me, as someone who values writing as a both an art and a craft, as well as a means of communication, that's just unacceptable - it's disrespectful to the audience and to the art/craft of writing itself. And as Hope mentions in the comments, anyone with above a sixth grade education damn well should know that PLURALS DO NOT TAKE APOSTROPHES, possessives do. Ahem. If someone (who has English as a native language, of course) can’t be arsed to apply basic grammar skills to their stories, then I can’t be arsed to read them, and if I do read and am asked for an opinion, I’ll lead with my red pen. So yeah, people should take newbies in hand, but not being familiar with 'fanfic culture' doesn't excuse people who don't bother to spell check or get basic things right. Because those are things that are required in 'real world culture' whenever one writes and it seems to me that anyone who thinks that fanfic is any different at that basic level from any other type of writing is someone who is too lazy for me to bother with. Ignorance only excuses so much. Maybe I'm splitting hairs, but I got burned last summer when I offered what I thought was a fair review of a story and why it didn't work for me, even though it was technically sound and, as original fiction, would have probably earned raves from me. I didn't change my review, nor did I take it down, and by my stats, I think it's the most read page in my diary. What that means, I don't know. But this is the thing – constructive criticism/critique is for the writer mostly, and also possibly for other writers to learn from (if it’s posted publicly – e.g., nothing like a good public debate on how to handle POV to make people who didn’t know anything about POV sit up and take notice. One would hope.). Reviews and recommendations are for *readers*, not writers. If an author doesn’t like what I have to say in either a review or a rec (and there's a reason I don't do them often, which is all tied up in the politics/etiquette of fandom), they can write me privately, but I’ll be damned if I take down a review or rec because I said, “I really liked this, even if I’m not sure of XYZ” or “It could have used a good line edit.” If they want me to remove the link, I will, but I’ll leave the review up. Yeah, I’m a spiteful bitca. This is news? I also think once somebody posts something publicly, they open themselves up to critique/review. And nobody ever said it was all going to be positive, happy fluffy puppies, baby bunnies and chicks. If you don’t ever want to hear anything negative, even if it’s of the helpful variety (i.e., constructive criticism), my advice is, don’t publish on the internet. The other thing? If you’re going to come over all high and mighty in a discussion of quality and writing, be credible. Misspellings and misused words and other laughably obvious errors are just going to convince me you don’t know what the *fuck* you’re talking about when you say something. You have no credibility on this issue if you can't express yourself correctly whilst discussing it. Waits for comments on any possible misspelled words, typos and grammatical/punctuation errors, as it is a law that any post about such things invariably contains such errors. ~victoria link [current mood: pugnacious; also, hurty] [current music: voodoo chile (slight return) - jimi version] [random quote: “It’s all about the he-said/she-said bullshit” – “Break Stuff” – Limp Bizkit] ~*~ 02.06.03 - 9:37 a.m. demons and taxes Sometimes my own obliviousness/inattention to detail really annoys me. As those of you who read this diary (and the LJ) regularly may know, I moved in the fall, and doubled my rent. And bought all new furniture. And still had Christmas. Etc. etc. So let's just say that while I was used to having a savings account in the low five digits, that is no longer the case. I have no cushion, and am pretty much living paycheck to paycheck until I can get the credit cards paid off. And that's fine. I mean, I'm not too worried because mostly it's cash flow issues. I can afford everything, it's just a matter of when the bills hit and when the paychecks come and making that all work out. Scheduling, as it were. But I want my tax refund (just like I wanted my insurance reimbursement) a little earlier than usual. I use Telefile, so I don't get a copy of the 1040EZ with the instructions and the forms and such, so I have to print them out online. Because there's no way in hell I'm going to submit my taxes, let the IRS do the figuring and not know what I'm getting back ahead of time. So I go to the IRS site and print out the instructions for the 1040EZ as well as a few copies of the forms ('cause I suck at math, yet do it all by hand the first time around and refuse to work in pencil). I get home last night and settle on my comfy red velvet couch, and ... I've printed off the 1040, not the 1040EZ. I'm looking at the form going, 'What the FUCK? I don't remember *that*. What the hell do they want to know *that* for?' Yeah, me, tax ignoramus. Sigh. Gonna print off the right forms now, so I can do it tonight. I have a dr's appt, then I'm going to do my taxes, clean the bathtub and have a bath. Such a thrilling life I lead, eh? And maybe figure out what the hell Giles is doing. Stupid Giles. Causing me difficulty. I hear Angel was really good last night. I have to say, the one or two moments I saw were pretty good, but then ... Silence of the Lambs is one of my All-Time Favorite Movies, right there in the Top Five with Casablanca, Star Wars and Raiders. And while DB and CC are no Tony Hopkins and Jodie Foster, Wes looked hot and there was an excellent atmosphere of claustrophobia down in that basement. ::shivers:: Hannibal: What is the first and principal thing he does, what need does he serve by killing? Clarice: Anger, social resentment, sexual frustration-- Hannibal: No, he covets. That's his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer. Clarice: No. We just-- Hannibal: No. Precisely. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? I hardly see how you couldn't. And don't your eyes move over the things you want? and Hannibal: You know what you look like to me, with your good bag and your cheap shoes? You look like a rube. A well-scrubbed, hustling rube with a little taste. Good nutrition has given you some length of bone, but you're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? And that accent you've tried so desparately to shed? Pure West Virginia. What's your father, dear? Is he a coal miner? Does he stink of the lamp? You know how quickly the boys found you... all those tedious sticky fumblings in the back seats of cars...while you could only dream of getting out... getting anywhere... getting all the way to the FBI. Of course, Angelus could never hope to be as clever as Hannibal, but I think that's only because DB's not such a great actor - he doesn't have the same air of intelligence, the same insinuating manner. He's too overtly brutish, though I've always loved the idea that the demon, that whatever it is that makes Angelus Angelus is the artist, the planner, the thinker, and that Liam is the blockhead. I just found out that my father mangled last week's taping, so I'm really, really hoping that his VCR worked this week. Really hoping. Ooh, and my comments are back! Yay! Crap. My quote didn't fit in the space down there, so here it is: "Amputate a man's leg and he can still feel it tickling. Tell me mum, when your little girl is on the slab, where will it tickle you?" I love that whole exchange with the senator. Sigh. I may have to watch that movie tonight while I'm doing my taxes. ~victoria link [current mood: okay] [current music: Over the Hills and Far Away - Zeppelin] [random quote: I do wish we could chat longer, but I'm having an old friend for dinner.] ~*~ 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. Management is not responsible for any adverse reactions to content within. The painting is "Boreas" by John William Waterhouse. Again, not a muse, but I like her. She suits the color scheme. The quote is from Sir Philip Sidney. 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