Cimorene

I am in the habit of saying I've had writer's block since the 2016 election, because November 2016 was the last time I managed a daily writing routine and the last time I worked on a piece of writing regularly. I was so upset by the election result that I couldn't do anything creative for months, and by the time I could have the Penguins (NHL pro hockey team) had gone to the Trump White House and they all shook hands with him. I had been writing a silly telepathic AU but one of the protagonists was Sidney Crosby, and I couldn't bear to write it after that and didn't want to read any of it either.

There have been several times since then when I've tried to work on abandoned WIPs. I spent some hours over a few weeks trying to cut and paste bits of the hockey fic, trying to get a version I could publish without any RPF names (in this case because I refuse to associate myself with them, and not for any monetary reason), but I gave up because the connection to real events was too strong and I didn't want to end up with the equivalent of those films where they change one or two letters out of a well-known brand to make sure you know which one they mean. I was like, that's the whole POINT, that I don't WANT it to be about them, but the problem is that it was and they were recognizable, there are thousands of words' worth of WORK that went into making it recognizable, but I don't WANT to publish anything recognizably about them, so I guess I have to leave it in the trash. It's sad, though, because I was having a lot of fun with the telepathy stuff. I greatly enjoy both reading and writing deconstructions of popular fanon tropes that are typically written with the same poorly-thought-out logistical problems. The telepathy trend in hockey RPF was a prime candidate because I've always loved telepathy in fiction, going back to actual sff novels in my childhood.

Anyway, that wasn't the only time. I spent even longer trying to pick back up and work on a My Chemical Romance novel that I was about 50% done with in 2008, the last time I was writing really volubly and prolifically, a story that I lost the ability to finish when my support network of friends active in the fandom and talking about it and keeping all our fannish interest up sort of tapered away. (I think this was one of those periods when people were mad at various members of the band and there was lots of vagueblogging, but I could be misremembering.) This latter one was such an extreme AU that I'm confident it would totally work if I changed all the names and everything; but I have never managed to get back into a groove, or to really decide how to tackle the next act of the plot.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about these over the years since then, because although I am used to saying that I have writer's block, I think a lot of what's happening is actually a completely different problem: not having a fandom anymore. I have spent time reading in a lot of fandoms since 2008, but I have not felt excited to participate in an active community with other fans whom I want to share ideas with since then. It's not simply that I haven't had an idea for something to write, because that isn't really an insuperable barrier; phrasing it that way is, I think, a bit backwards; it's really that I can't get excited about taking part in the fanfiction conversation.

If there's a great body of fannish work stretching back years and I'm still really interested in all of it and I have a new idea, but it's basically a dead fandom that doesn't have other writers I'm excited about currently writing in it, then I'm not going to get excited about writing.

If I have a fantastic idea and I know for a fact that one of my best friends is interested, but there's literally no fandom and the only way anybody else will read it is if I manage to write it for Yuletide, then I'm not gonna get excited about writing it (uh, unless I get a chance to write it for Yuletide, I guess, but that would require me to sign up, and I have more and more trouble finding enough fandoms I can sign up for as time goes on).

If the canon is current and still updating and there's plenty of buzz, but there's only a tiny smattering of fanfiction, I'm not going to get excited about writing.

There has to be a COMMUNITY of writers having a conversation that I'd like to join in; it has to be more than just one or two, so that there's like a whole... pool of ideas in the shared universe that everybody is participating in. It usually seems to me that only a minority of fandoms are really active enough to describe this way, and the canon has to be exciting to me too. And also, these writers have to be people I want to enter a conversation with, which will not be the case if they're all posting WIPs with authors' notes about how they haven't bothered to get a beta or an American picker. More power to them, I guess, if they're enjoying fandom the way that feels good to them, but it's not a conversation I'm gonna be eager to join any more than a conversation about sports or the Bachelorette or where to buy vinyl records in Turku.

I suppose in theory the answer to all this might be to write something original instead, but they aren't really equivalent.

I have spent more and more time "without a fandom" as the years go by. Not even just not having a fandom to belong to, but not even having a fandom that I'm currently reading in: that is truly impoverished, from the point of view of me fifteen years ago. I can always find fanfiction to read - there's years' worth of stuff to reread out there! But you don't always want to reread things, either. (Maybe this is why I've spent so much time reading genres/bodies of work like vintage Golden Age murder mysteries and medieval romances.)

My wife has been watching the terrible US primetime soaps in the 911 franchise and reading that recently, and before that she was watching the terrible show Roswell: New Mexico, and in each case she started off by reading some random fiction and progressed to watching the show, but by the time I was desperate enough to have potentially considered reading some, I had had time to be put off permanently by seeing the show. In the case of 911, I've seen enough to say the shipping seems probably correct but I hate one of the characters too much to want nice things to happen to him. (I would probably have been fine if I read first, but too late.) She contends that the fandoms are fairly active and there's a good proportion of good fiction in them, but I suspect her standards are affected by shipper lenses. Also I might be more picky in general, although it's hard to say because I read things that I don't consider to be good on purpose, and enjoy them (just in a different way), whereas she tries to only read things that are mediocre or better, and likes to discover things by surfing around through bookmarks and rec lists to try to improve the odds. My habit, on the other hand, has always been kind of bottom-dredging - I used to call it archive-diving or fic-spelunking - combing through the archive myself with my chosen filters, scanning and discarding on the basis of headers. I usually find that a random rec list is no better than throwing a dart at a pile of fic; only recs from someone whose taste I have some reason to trust have a good enough success rate for me to spend time on them.

We were both really excited about Hannibal and Black Sails, and although I did read some fanfiction in both cases, even then we couldn't join the fandoms, or actually even want to join the fandoms... possibly because the show writing was too good? We are really into Interview with the Vampire (television) now, and Wax even reread all the Anne Rice vampire books up to the point where they got too crazy like, last year, in celebration. But even though IWTV is decidedly NOT too good, I guess maybe the show is good enough that it seems more rewarding to see where it's going? But it also might be that after reading the Taltos books I am not sure if I'm up to reading any more of Rice's work and I would never consider writing in a film fandom without reading the books it was based on, while Wax just could not vibe with it (if I remember her expressed sentiment correctly). There is a fandom there - not a huge one, but one that it would be possible to follow and read, but it's kind of... I keep going back and checking on it to see if I find it more appealing yet and then sighing and leaving again.

Maybe I just got old and, you know, lost too much synaptic plasticity to adapt to what the big fandom masses are doing anymore. I'm only 42, by the way. But I guess that could actually be it.

I was truly astounded to encounter a new-to-me form of the pretending to be married trope a couple of weeks ago.

The British film Young Wives' Tale (1951), a romantic comedy (misogyny warning), based on a 1949 play of the same name by Ronald Jeans.

Premise: due to the post-war housing shortage, a young married couple are renting out rooms in the house they own, one of them to another young married couple who have a toddler close in age to their daughter. Even though the renters are home all day (a writer and an actress who quit work to be a "homemaker"), they can't manage between them to watch their own toddler, and the homeowners' nanny quits in a huff over being asked to watch a second kid "as a favor". (I gather they don't bring up sharing the salary because the writer doesn't make enough money to afford it.) The house is thrown into disorder and homeowner Mary hits on the solution: pretend the toddlers are siblings so that the next nanny won't see anything wrong in watching them both. She gets an old-fashioned retired lady and due to Comedy Circumstances, the new nanny gets the idea that the two couples are married the other way around, and they have to continue to pretend after lying to her the first time to keep her from quitting. ( Read more... ) They SHOULD have switched. In fact, I think if a movie like this came out in the 1980s or later they probably would have.

Instead they end up apologizing to each other. The homeowner man who was making such a babyish fuss that his wife kept her job only needed to be told that she really does have emotions but she finds it hard to express them, and as soon as he sees her cry he is magically transformed. The Renter Guy has a fit of jealousy (not about the homeowner guy - there's an old boyfriend who remains her friend) and after he gets over it she's like "I really do TRY to cook and do housework" and he is suddenly like "Oh I know it's okay". Not a very good ending. The comedy pace only survives because of a couple of scenes where the nanny catches people kissing their spouses and declares it's a house of infamy and quits.

The academic field that I abandoned after a couple of years all those ages ago, without writing a bachelor's thesis, was sociology. In recent years, when it occurred to me to potentially (someday) finish the degree now that it's easier to study at a distance, I've started occasionally gnawing away at what (sub)fields there are of interest to me, if any.

And also lately I've been occasionally thinking about organizational culture. With all the discussions swirling around problems with the OTW in recent years and the mental comparisons I've inevitably made to the volunteers and committees related to the Unitarian Universalist congregation I grew up in, I've always wondered if science (but it might be more likely to be psychology than sociology?) has something to tell us about the dynamics of volunteer organizations and why it is that they seem to be so similarly prone to the same kinds of failings. I tried to google the idea a bit, and it seems the concept of organizational culture has pretty much been taken over from sociology by business schools in recent years, and yuck, but also I'm specifically thinking about volunteer organizations here anyway. I know there is a body of research on charities and the problems that arise as they scale up, which is also interesting but maybe not exactly what I'm thinking about.

There was a recent national scandal in the Finnish Red Cross (up on the west coast of Finland some way away from here) to do with a boss who turned out to have been abusive for a long time to a whole bunch of employees, and it hasn't really led to a thorough reckoning or even a complete investigation by a third party, although people have been fired and resigned. This is nothing ESPECIALLY shocking; big charities have scandals like this with some regularity, and this isn't even nearly as bad as some of the international Red Cross scandals I remember in my adult life. I suppose this probably is dealt with in the research on the problems with big charities that I mentioned. The Finnish Red Cross, at the national level, has a high degree of transparency and a lot of regulations and checks and things, but perhaps these regulations are more complete and more useful in terms of the volunteers, members, and leadership, and less so in terms of the stuff that's staffed by employees?

And this Hugo disaster now is just absolutely flabbergasting. The fact that it now looks like the genre's hugely prestigious literary awards were made fraudulent for the whole year mostly at the instigation of one volunteer Western bad actor probably prompted in large part by ignorant racism?, assisted willingly by a bunch more Western volunteers who didn't sound the alarm at the time even though we hear that more than one was uncomfortable - the fact that it was apparently not even difficult for this to happen with the active efforts of what looks like perhaps quite a small group of people, possibly without any input from Chinese participants... it's bizarre in multiple ways, frankly, but one of the most amazing things is the level of institutional failure implied. I know the Hugos and Worldcon are run by small volunteer committees and that we're not talking about a huge number of people involved in planning. But at the same time, they're an institution that operates at the scale of Worldcon, with a huge community that they represent. The inevitable conclusion that they've been running like this all along, apparently held together with chewing gum and string, with most of the participants passively nodding along even to something as absolutely crazy as this...! That there are no built in checks or balances with enough robustness to ensure that someone with the ability to go "Wait just a goddamn minute here" is going to see what's happening before it happens! And that someone can coast into such a key position even if they're known by a bunch of people around the community after multiple reports to multiple conventions to be a serial sexual harrasser! It's a stunning indictment.

For a while I was following the reading regimen described in this entry, which is what led to my recent post about awkward moments in revisiting past fandoms. I read Smallville for a while too; I just ran out of it before the others and was reduced to just DS9 and DS. A couple of days ago I ran out of DS9 as well. I'm pretty sure that a lot of this is due to a lower percentage of early works in Smallville and DS9 having been imported to AO3 over the years. I'm not saying I would necessarily have enjoyed rereading them all or wanted to bookmark them, but I do feel like I didn't see all the ones I've read in the pre-AO3 era. So there's only a couple of Smallville bookmarks, but I have a bunch of the others. This is just a first batch.

( smallville (2) )

( star trek: deep space nine (5) )

( due south (5) )

I've read all the books by all the Golden Age mystery writers I've tried and liked so far, and I'm a little concerned I may have difficulty finding more.

That includes the last of the Thorndyke mysteries, although I first read some of them a few years ago so I could perhaps read a few again. Really, though, I'm going to have to think about what to read next, annoyingly. Maybe I can pick an old fandom I haven't read in a long time.

I don't have any Sentinel bookmarks on ao3, though I've definitely read through the fandom and even combed through the old archive multiple times, before it was imported. Maybe I couldn't find most of my old bookmarks when I was trying to move them to ao3? Or maybe it's that recently I've reread them from Wax's old bound slash instead of online a few times.

Earlier this week I was still thinking there was no point in backing up my Twitter yet since they were probably overrun in server requests for these backups and it's not like it was going to disappear overnight; the kind of failures people are predicting here take time to happen.

But I decided to go ahead and request an archive of my tweets anyway. I guess I might as well get in the queue in case employees have to handle them directly. I don't want them all to leave before somebody sends me my tweets.

I've been meaning to get around to checking out mastodon and those fannish attempts at user-hosted social media for... years... I'm not great at getting around to stuff.

I've been seeing the backlash over the British royals' visit to Jamaica (I've been seeing Twitter and Tumblr threads, but here's a Guardian article) and this reminds me of some other stuff I saw on Twitter recently: there was some kind of controversy (?) in Britain about something Prince William and some friend said/did recently and then there was some kind of explainer thread referring to 'rumors' and 'secret royal sources' etc to summarize that this other wealthy couple were Kate and William's best friends and neighbors at their rural primary residence but it apparently turned out that William was having an affair with the woman and Kate was demanding complete separation from the couple (understandably) and it was all extremely sordid and soap opera. This current story, which I think could be summarized in progressive Twitter opinion as "Why Did They Think This Was a Good Look?!", isn't even the first recent example of revelations of complete Yikes about Prince William, though, even aside from the whole racism!! thing connected to the schism with Harry and Meghan.

But anyway, my point is that from where I'm sitting, it seems like my generation of the North American Anglophone world has undergone a comically extreme evolution on the subject of Prince William.

The first time I remember being aware of the existence of William and Harry was when I was in middle school, 14-15ish?, and he was a reasonably popular celebrity Hot Guy to the middle class and nerdy American white girls of my acquaintance. There were posters of William (less frequently Harry) and pictures occasionally alongside boyband-type pinups and there were occasional conversations amounting to everyone agreeing on him being hotter than Harry. When I was in high school and later, the modern versions of romance-with-a-prince fiction started to be based on him; there were definitely some YA romances that were just rpf with self-insert ocs with the names changed. And as I moved through my 20s, the Romance With Royal Prince AU became increasingly popular as a type of fanfiction. Of course, because it's slash, these dealt with the idea of a royal coming out as gay as a major plotpoint, but most of the time the stories and plots were still clearly an evolution of the self-insert-with-prince-William idea, with a trope-laden, recognizably Romance Genre Heroine viewpoint character who was usually reasonably transparent.

But NOW this cultural narrative template has transformed into the middle class girl-next-door stuck in a permanent straightjacket of Jackie O-pastels and perfectly coiffed unthreatening feminine hair and makeup with a not-so-dreamy-anymore spineless git who is secretly mean to her and deliberately had an affair with her best friend, and BOTH of them are racist enough to cut off his brother over it?!

The positive PR that the royals (and unfortunately the concept of monarchy) received from the photogenicness of young Harry and William has sure gone places. Since I find celebrity gossip annoying on the whole and am philosophically opposed to monarchies in principle, my observation of these trends was usually tinged with impatience, but I have to admit that in recent years the turn towards anti-monarchism has livened it up. I do enjoy seeing that with mild glee, although not enough to seek out more of it than inevitably crosses my path anyway.

Obviously breakup fic is never going to reach huge status in slash fanfiction because romance drives the fannishness of the relationships, but it is really funny to think about the wavy fanfic mirrors of Prince William also turning out to be a combination of cruel and pathetic, cheating on the fairytale gay princess characters while suddenly looking haplessly terrible in every possible PR framing.

I was so excited that waxjism made a post yesterday that I made her like sixteen new icons today because when she was looking through them last night, we were laughing about how old and how long out of date most of them were to her recent interests. Wax always (usually) has made icons for herself before, but she's so lacking in motivation that I knew she'd never choose to spend the time doing that instead of reading stuff about Roswell New Mexico. Also I thought if she had some icons about shows she really likes she might be motivated to start uploading icons and then maybe she would upload one of the hand-drawn text ones I made for her, and then I could see which one she likes the best (she plays it close to the chest). So far this hasn't worked, but you never know.

I THINK this is more than the total number of icons I've made for myself in the last... 3? years. I did delete some and reupload some old icons recently, but I haven't made any new ones that I wanted to use in ages (except the bakelite radio and the William Morris wallpaper)(I don't count icons of my own drawings here... not sure why, but... I don't).

Wax likes Timothy Chalamet, and The Expanse and Babylon Berlin a lot, and neither of those shows has been canceled yet!, and they're both prestige tv. Actually I couldn't find any good hd stills from The Expanse, presumably simply because their marketing department sucks, because if you capped it yourself you could get tons. But there were plenty from Babylon Berlin, which I don't watch because I don't watch things about the Nazis and probably wouldn't like because I don't like things that are that dark and depressing, but it is beautiful to look at. In fact it's production designed by my hero, Uli Hanisch, the production designer of The Queen's Gambit, Babylon Berlin, Cloud Atlas, and Perfume. (There are some other great production designers out there, but he's my favorite contemporary one whose work I've seen).

But my point is, I haven't fannishly identified with anything (well, anything that is a fandom and not like, an architectural movement) comparably since... Hannibal and Black Sails? IDK. Now this seems kind of sad.

It's funny consuming something and identifying bits that would be seized on if it had a fandom.

Well, let's be honest, if it had a media fandom, because book fandoms don't get big enough, really. (This applies to TV and movies too though, of course.)

'This would definitely be the 2 side guys pairing that would get more slash than a popular het ship... and this guy would be the favorite redeemed bad boy and people would slash him with the protagonist in spite of his canon partner... and this guy would be a meme.'

Envisioning the otp-breaking ships that I know would happen almost makes me glad there's no fandom. Not quite though. (I want the memes.)

You know, at the time I was quite frustrated with Livejournal as a platform for hosting fic, as were so many other people, but it was the best many people had access to until AO3 came along. And in retrospect, at least there was SOME semblance of navigability, if the mods or owners of the journal in question chose to use it.

I could never have conceived of a platform as bad for fic hosting as Tumblr, yet almost daily I scroll by posts from people who have wilfully placed it there even though AO3 exists now and is free to join and use.