elanya

I have not been great at this.. ha ha ha...but its fine, I don't have a ton to say I gues!

I read three more KJ Charles books (Specterd Isle, Band Sinister, and Death in the Spires). The continue to be very fun! There is also an excellent fan community that I am enjoying very much.

I also read Blood in the Machine, a book about the Luddites and the modern tech revolution, which had some really interesting stuff that was really engaging and in other parts was more of a slog. And today I finished Becky Chambers A Psalm for the Wild Built, which was a cozy light little novella that I think would have been better if I had never read Braiding Sweetgrass, because I am just looking at the relationships of people to the world in that and going 'no you could do better than that actually' when it is supposed to be utopic. But I still enjoyed it and grabbed the sequel. For 'cozy books with low stakes plot focused around cozy beverages" I enjoyed it better than Legends and Lattes, possibly just because I am a Tea Person more than a Coffee Person.  I'll tackle the sequel next, and then I have Daisy Jones & the Six and then probably back to a couple more KJC and then who knows!  Probably my hold on Godkiller will come in again while I'm in the middle of something else long of have a queue piling up and I will out it back into circulation again :p

I realized I never did post links to all the things I wrote for the Rare Kink Buffet but, it's all on my AO3 :x  I also did post my long (for me) plotty Adventure World thing which 7 whole people have looked at and maybe half that actually read.  It is okay, its fine.  I'm not a popular taste, I'm a speicialty one.  or something.  IDK.  Despite being in my feelings forever about never figuring out how to entice people to read the things I write that I get super invested in, I have turned around and started a massive spin-off slow burn fic about a character I created whole cloth for the last one.  So even more of a niche audience.  I'm a good 7k into it already, ha ha ha.  This will be the 10th thing I have written, even that is over 10k.  I do this to myself, literally no one else is asking for it :V 

Family homes things continue to continue.  Probably no one is going to sell my home out from under me at this juncture, but I also doubt my housemate will actually ever move out either, because they also can't afford it.  So meanwhile they do things like have week-long visitors and never wash a single dish.  And my sister twisted her ankle, so I have been doing extra dog duty as well.  This is fine when it is nice and I can just go out in the back and kick a ball around with Hades and he is happy.  The yard is greening up, and my wild strawberries and sweetgrass are going mad, and lots of plant that may not even be terrible plants are coming up in place I want them too!  But also of of terrible plants.  who will will: catmint vs bellflower -_-  Possibly I have forgotten with knapweed looks like, or else I really have made a major dent in it, finally.  I need to get a garden fork to deal with some of this stuff more effectively.

Oh, I also got my tax return!  I treated myself to a new Fancee Pillow, which arrived yesterday, some nice hand lotion, and diner for the fam.  And then I had to buy a bunch of dog stuff and was immediately poor again.  But not in debt, so I'll take it.

Anyway, I am watching Fangs of Fortune very slowly with Nary and Kennesaw, and we are scheduled to do a few more eps imminently. 

And also - I signed up for Jukebox and I already have offers for my songs and found some cool stuff to offer.  So, yay!  and now, off I go for TV times.

I mean, pretty good but not perfect. I thought the AUs should all be further down, but the tops 6 are are pretty spot on.

Do your own here!

1 Hurt/Comfort
2 Polyamory
2 Found Families
2 Loyalty Kink
5 Enemies to Friends to Lovers
6 Seemingly Unrequited Pining
( ... )

Right now I have two journals - this one, and one for writing (measured_words). I mean I guess technically I have an imzy too but I always for get about that, and I don' think anyone really moved to there that I engage with much? I totally engage with people on LJ and DW, Right? ....Right? >.>).

I used to post fic directly to my writing journal, in the pre-AO3 days, and there is a lot of old stuff, and original stuff, there. Then I used to post links to my AO3 in my writing journal, and then I posted fic roundup, but lately all I *really* use it for is exchanges. So I am wondering if it is worth keeping, or if I should just transition to doing all my exchange stuff over here? I think I already confuse people to some extent because my AO3 name is my writing journal name and not this one (or one of the derivatives.... I'm Lan in yulechat, which is short for Lannie which is short for Elanya. That journal has my writing *history*, though. If I start posting exchange letters here.... I guess probably it won't matter; I can just say that if people want to look at older letters and such, they can look there?

I guess I'm not totally sure what function it serves any more, really. People who want to read my fic can do it on AO3 and subscribe there if they're interested, and I can just as easily post roundups here as there if I get back in the habit. While I have been writing some original fic, the last time I posted anything to my writing journal was.... *checks* okay I guess it was March. I thought it was longer ago than that. I also did the AO3 stats meme in that journal early last yeas, so maybe it isn't as neglected as I thought :p Still, most of the people who read this are fannish folks, and I presume that even if they weren't interested in the stories, writing memes, drabble challenges (I need to finish that last one still -_-), etc, they wouldn't be offended to see them here. I usually link them here anyway, and that's how I get half my traffic.

Also, I have been reading stuff about the LJ servers moving, and I'm not totally sure I want original fic living there anymore, and have been considering deleting that journal and just keeping the mirror on DW. I guess maybe it's too late at this point, if it is already there. I would want to make sure I didn't lose a any comments before deleting, and I'm not sure how I'd go about that.

Really, though, any change smacks of effort. I can't even get with it enough to change my icons - I'm not convinced I'm really up to a restructuring of my journals...

(I do know what I want my new icons to *be* at least, but I need someone to take the photos for me :p)

I am currently on a train enroute to Toronto with my sister, who very generously offered to take me with her to Fan Expo! We're going for the Saturday only, mostly so she can glory in the presence of Mads Mikkelsen and Gillian Anderson. We're also going to hit up the Q&A with Jason Momoa :)

Other than that, we will wander around and... Stuff I guess! The are some interesting panels, but mostly not tomorrow or at times that conflict with other stuff (no casual taxidermy for us!)

I also plan to check out the Underworld table and say hello to folks there - someday I will get to a game, Damnit!

We are staying with a cousin who I haven't seen in years, but who longpig managed to convert to Fannibalism, so that will also be fun :)

Here's to a fun weekend away, I guess :)

A month ago, Jess Zimmerman posted an article on The Toast titled 'Where's My Cut?": On Unpaid Emotional Labour'.

In response to that article, there was a huuuuuuuuuuuge conversation on metafilter - I have literally been reading it in bits and pieces all week.

There is a lot to think about there, though a lot of it is personal stories. Also fair warning, some people I know have found some of the discussions traumatic as they hit a little close to home or are triggery in other ways.

One of the things that this had made me think about is somethig that first occurred to me in the midst of a ficthropology episode recording, about the appeal of writing slash relationships: the authors are creating a context in which not only are men required to perform emotional labour, they do so in a context in which they *do not rely on female partners to provide it.*

A lot of really common and popular tropes revolve around emotional labour - hurt/comfort being the most glaring example, but others are also relevant, including mpreg, a/b/o, found families, accidental baby acquisition, curtain fic... Probably I could come up with more if I were thinking about it! I am not sure what this makes of genderswap, but that is worth thinking about as well. Is it a matter of coming full circle to genderswap a male character? Or is it some other unrelated thing going on there?

I don't mean to suggest that this is a conscious choice, but I do wonder if there is some kind of subconscious catharsis in just opting out of women doing emotional labour for men in fiction, and making them do it for themselves. I also don't mean to suggest that everyone does things for the same reason - that is definitely not the case. But to me, it is a much more satisfying answer to me in terms of why slash is so prevalent than just that we, as (mostly) women, don't find relationships with women in them that interesting. Women doing carrying the bulk of emotional labour is not extraordinary - it's just life.

I feel like there is a lot more to say here, but I am not feeling super well still/again, so this is what you are gonna be stuck with, for now!

A. The 'post lines from three WIPs' meme! I'm doing two lines each because context :p
1: Ralf could tell Ander was pissed off, more than he let on, he just wasn’t exactly sure about what. It was in his movements, usually casual and fluid but now carried out with an overly efficient economy of movement. (Diablotin, current active WIP)

2: You might think it silly, but I imagine what disagreements we might have over foolish things like what colour or style of drapes is more suitable, and I try to work though how best we might compromise. I know you told me that as I am living there on my own for the moment I should simply do as I wish, but I would rather at least have the illusion of your presence. (Diablotin, on-hold WIP to be resumed maybe after trope Bingo stories are done?)

3: Attal had never felt betrayed by Kai Leed until she'd found her working with Odos Caan. By now they'd crossed blades many more times, but her feelings were still mixed about her old master – her old friend. (Star Wars, WIP in sort of weird limbo :/)

B: ( I had a weird dream last night. )

I woke up at 7 from this and I miiiiight have taken my acid reflux meds or I might have only dreamed I did. I was uncertain enough on the point after I woke up from dozing again a little while later that I opted not to take them again, so hopefully that was the right choice because I am almost out of backup heartburn stuff :p

C: I really just want to work on writing, because between last night and this morning I have things better sorted out, I think, for my plot progression. However I am also trying to do a job application a week at this point and I haven't done anything in that direction yet, so I need to get a handle on that. If I can find something good. maybe a WW first though.... and a staff meeting later this afternoon. Wheeee!

What madness!

I was asked to post this (internet points if you can guess by who) so hey:

Give me a fandom and I will tell you who I ship in said fandom!

(Or I might stare at you blankly and go 'what's that?' but hey - it's worth a shot? :D )

Hello journal-land! I'm still out here, still trying to stay connected. At least, still shouting into the void (mostly void, partially stars).

I keep having Things I want to Write About - yesterday when I was walking Jola it was about storytelling media and how I feel more engaged by participatory stories, but they are harder to share with non-participants. Shorthand whining, I suppose for "no1 currrrrr about my game-inspired fics". The same old thing. I just wish I could find more effective ways, because I have always felt way more 'fannish' about these kinds of things, but they're so limited in audience. But those are the stories, for the most part, that consume my brain. I was going to rite about this in more detail, but apparently this is all you get. I am dedicating my Trope Bingo line to some gaming characters though - pre-canon (mostly) NPC adventures, so as to limit my audience even further... I suppose I could argue that as they are 'pre-canon' they might be more accessible to outsiders, but I don't know if that is at all true. I've realized that I really am terrible at gauging accessibility in that regard. If I tell you something doesn't require canon knowledge - well, I might be wrong. But try it? It could be good anyway :V be bring so much to the table when we are engaging with fanworks, and we're not always conscious of it all.

What else. I am working on my second story involving those characters, not for trope bingo. I am enjoying treating it as a serious story, thinking about structure and plot and pacing and stuff, and not just 'these are the things that happen and the feels that are felt', but how those things are communicated to my non-existent audience. So that's good practice, I suppose, if nothing else?

I need to be applying for more jobs still. I have two in my sights and I will be screaming into that void tonight. One is in Saint Louis, the other in South Orange, New Jersey. We'll see. I have not heard back about a single other thing I have applied for so yaaay.

I also have some Wrangling Staff work to keep at. I have been doing little chunks in the morning to keep on top of small things, but there are some Big Things that Need Lots of Brain I want to focus on and I've been having trouble with that. balancing with job searching and everything else is a little wearying, honestly. But I'll survive. I need to get back on top of some of my wrangled fandoms too, as far as the freeforms go. Holding on there too, at least!

so, that's me. I'm back home as of Sunday, and Maze has been velcro kitty since then. He is clingy in the colder months already, but this is pretty spectacularly so. I have two knitting projects on the go,. which is not my usual modus operandi - one for home, and one for work. I may have said this already. I already fucked up the lace in my Ishbel >_<

Okay, back to working at the job I have for the moment!

This came to me while I was falling asleep, thinking partly about trope bingo and how I am planning to do a fantasy AU of a fantasy setting...

I wonder if there would be any interest in a Trope Remix? I don't have a tine of time to write this out but I wanted to get something down before I forgot - you would be given a trope or a series of three, maybe, in a week or 10 day period, and you would take a pre-existing fic and write maybe 500 words of a remix of that story reworking that trope into it. What would X story look like in an AU setting? With an accidental baby acquisition instead of whatever maguffin it uses currently? The goal would be to keep things recognizable to some extent. This is more of a writing exercise than a story generation thing though. I dunno. You could remix your own story, anything from someone with a blanket transformative work permission, or anything you had explicit permission for, just to keep things kind, I think? You wouldn't have to complete a whole story, just a snippet that demonstrates the changes.

I don't know who would be interested in such a thing. I don't know that *I* would even be interested enough in it (certainly not enough to run it >.>), but it would be an interesting challenge I think? And it would certainly get me playing more explicitly with tropes than I do now.

Anyway, it was a random falling asleep thought that I thought worth throwing out there. Discuss amongst yourselves?

marthawells linked to a tumblr post today by Sarah Reese Brennan, published author, about how she has been stigmatized for being an author who came out of writing fanfiction.

I haven't read any of her stuff, pro or fan, so I can't really comment on the quality either way, but the post made me think about how reading fanfiction is differen that reading original work, in terms what the reader brings to the table here. And while I don't want to over look her point that this is a case of womens' traditions being dismissed, I think there is some other stuff going on that informs the reaction she has gotten from readers *inside* of fandom. I suepect her points about readers outside of fandom are pretty spot on.

This relates to some thoughts I have about writing fanfiction, that I have seen expressed elsewhere as well (honestly I think I can pretty reliably fall back to Jenkins' Textual Poachers here, but I don't have it at hand to give direct references) - fandom lets us use a sort of character shorthand in writing. I can tell you that this person is Harold Finch, or Harry Potter or Edward Cullen and that tell you, the reader, what you need to bring to this story. You can project into that text things you already know. You bring a context to the table that helps you see the characters as you are told they are - "yes, these two characters snarking at each other are definitely Kirk and Bones, not Tony and Steve, or any two other male friends with a hefty helping of UST."

This ability extends when we take the characters out of their original contexts and place them into an Alternate Universe. Context creates character, and changing that context changes the character - that's what makes AU's attractive, I think. You can explore what-if scenarios, you can map character progressions onto different even and see what changes, knowing that your readers have the same starting point that you do. They know what you're starting with, so when you explore how things have changed when Kirk is a barista instead of a starship captain, or how the characters in Game of Thrones would faction in a High School setting, or how Hamlet would be different if it was set in space instead of Denmark, they can follow along, they have a basis of comparison for understanding how, despite the changes in context, the characters are still 'essentially' the same.

We don't get that kind of roadmap with original characters. It's all unexplored territory. But I think that, knowing that an author was into fandom, there might be a tendency to *look*, to bring those projections to the text, to identify the familiar where it was not intended, to make connections and assumptions, because we've seen how extremely we can transform a character and have them retain their essential qualities. Transformation is what we do in fandom, and I think this reaction to fic-authors-turned-pro is (at least in part) a product of how we learn to read transformed texts. If we can see Edward Cullen in Christopher Gray, where else might he turn up? I think it is easy to see why outsiders would believe the people who are considered to be more familiar with an author's work if they're told that it is derivative in this way. And I think that Brennan is very correct in her observation that this *kind* of transformative project gets dismissed and derided, for all the same (wrong, imho) reasons that fanfiction does, and that there is an aspect of sexism involved. It just compounds the issue of these authors not being taken seriously as producers of original work.

[Brennan also brings up Cassandra Claire, and of course that's a biiiig complicated can of worms that she doens't get into or address, the short version of which is that CC was villified by parts of fandom well before she ever succeeded professionally. Bringing her into the conversation certainly complicates the issue, and I'm not sure exactly what to make of it.]

ETA:
Jennifer Lynn Barnes" also wrote a response piece, looking at the idea of parasocial relationships, and how we project emotions and motives onto people that we feel like we have relationships with, but which are really one-sided. In this case, although she is looking at people projecting motives and actions onto authors, I think it does relate to what I was talking about above - we have these relationships with these characters, we see them, we project them where they may not really be, because we are projecting authorial intent as well.

ETA2: Talking about this some with naryrising, and she mentioned a couple things worth noting, the first of which is that she was surprised that none of the articles (including mine) mentioned good old jealousy as a reason that authors who go pro after writing fic get backlash from inside fandom - I'm sure that is part of it as well. She also noted that in her post, Brennan compares her work to Supernatural, rightly noting the differences. But she doesn't compare it to supernatural *fandom*, where there are authors who may have more similar projects with their own work - giving more agency and prominence to female and queer characters, changing the setting, etc. This just goes along with the projections that fic readers bring to a text, let alone how they read the author's motives (or their own), though I think all of these things are in play.