The Tyranny of Socks

How much do I want to avoid work today? So very, very much. Instead, I will talk about writing. traveller made this post about her problems with the term "jossed," and at first it didn't strike me, but now that I think about it, I have noticed a lot of people I know worrying about going off-canon, and needing their stories to match canon at the time of posting, rather than canon at the time they started writing. Or deciding that they can't write a story any more, because it has been contradicted by canon.

I am not sure that I get that. Sure, some stories can fit seamlessly into canon, but not all of them will. There are lots of good stories which change canon: they involve new characters, they resolve ongoing issues, they move the characters forward so significantly that they can't be fit back into the canon universe. I like it when stories do that. I like it when a story shifts the emphasis slightly, so that the canon looks a little different when you're done with it. I don't mind if a story breaks off from canon at a specific point, especially when an author is dealing with an open canon, and a quickly-moving one.

And yet traveller's intro set a couple of my alarm bells ringing:

back in 'Nam, we used to just put a line in the author's note. for the purposes of this story, Krycek has both arms. or, I'm considering events through last season's finale but nothing further. or, in this story, the thing with the thing never happened. I don't know if people complained to other writers; they didn't say anything to me. but lately? I get the impression from a lot of people that if a story is at any time contradicted by canon, it becomes worthless. or worth less, anyway.

The thing is, I am in it for the story, and that includes the canon story as well as the fanfic story. To my ears, "that thing never happened" is all too often code for "I as an author do not really care about the canon story, and also, I am tired of my beta-readers asking me whether Krycek is levitating in that sex scene, or what." It sounds to me like the author is cutting corners, even though I know that's not always the case. Whereas, "we break away from canon here," means to me, "I care about canon logic, but I care about the logic of my story, too." It's a reassurance, rather than a warning; it tells me that the author has thought about the canon, and the way her story fits into the canon, and decided to follow her story. I love canon, but there's nothing wrong with leaving it behind for a little while: it'll still be there when you get back.

ETA: Perhaps this wasn't clear the first time around, but I do agree with traveller's larger point -- that I don't really get the insistence of judging a story by later canon, or really, in worrying too much about departing from it, if that's what the story needs. The Krycek thing is a throwaway, but it's a throwaway I tend to fixate on.

I appear to have slept through the zombie apocalypse. Interesting. I told my husband that having a zombie apocalypse contingency plan would be worthwhile; it's nice to be proved right, I guess.

Hope you're all enjoying those tasty brains, or locked up in a mall somewhere with a lot of guns.

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I am almost ready to let my new website loose on the world. It's not the prettiest or best-designed set of pages, but the text is there, and that's what matters, right?

It turns out that my impression that I've been productive in SPN is largely due to the fact that Blessings is so much bigger than anything else I've done (almost 25,000 words at the moment); that and all the drabbles I wrote last summer. And maybe that I seem to have a lot of stories in progress. I was surprised at how many stories I'd written in Alias, though: 29, not counting crossovers. But then, I was pretty active in the fandom for about three years, so maybe it's not all that strange, and of course most of them are fairly short.

One of the interesting things about making the page has been figuring what to put in and what to leave out. My livejournal is scattered with half-formed stories which will probably never be finished, and which I can't quite justify putting up on the page. It's not that I don't like them, it's just that they aren't whole stories, not in the way that even a drabble is a single, whole thing. Perhaps someday I'll put up a page of abandoned stories.

I know I'm copying this meme from someone on my friendslist, but I can't remember who. But in honor of international women's day, five stories about women, in five fandoms. Some gen, some not so gen.

Iron Points North (AtS, Fred): Fred needs to be somewhere else.
This is a small story, just four brief scenes from Fred's life, but I think it turned out well.

The Gates of Ivory (XF, Marita): Marita goes on a quest.
So it's resfic, and Krycek is a complete bastard as usual in my stories, and I'm not entirely sure about the style, but I was proud of it when I wrote it and I'm still quite fond of it.

Dust and Air (SPN, Missouri): I went to Missouri and I learned the truth.
See, even in a fandom famous for not having women in it, I'm still writing about women. It's like a curse, except the good kind of curse.

Dancing in Illusion (FF/SW, River): River takes Serenity dancing through the darkness.
I wrote this as a pinch-hit for last year's multiverse, and I think it came out well: as soon as I saw River and Yoda on the prompt list I knew I could write it.

Obituary (Alias, Irina): A legend for a girl.
Irina, looking back on Lauren. I need to try the first person again, someday.

OK, there were two three runners-up: Morning (XF, Marita), Tense and Skin (Alias, Sydney/Lauren), and Memorial Inscriptions (HP/BtVS, Dawn/Hermione), but the first was too much like everything else I write, I just don't like the second quite as much as I like Obituary (even though it's probably a better story) and the third... actually, I don't know why I didn't add the third. Really, Dawn/Hermione is just a perfect pairing. Numerology, demonology, ice cream and bad drama.

The other thing I learned from this is that it's been a year and a half since I updated my web site, and I really need to do something about that. But now there are lots of stories and it all seems so overwhelming.

Good morning and Happy Hanukkah!

I've been browsing around without actually posting much, largely because typing anything but Yuletide fills me with guilt. (As BH reminded me, though, freaking out about Yuletide is something of a tradition for me. I have attempted to persuade him that this year it's different and worse, with no luck.)

We've also been rewatching BSG; we're up to Episode 5. ( cut for minor spoilers )

That turned out to be more negative than I meant it to -- but I'm going back downstairs to do some writing, and don't really feel like editing it.

Later today (my today, here in the UK) I'll be posting the second part of Xú Landing, and that will bring the first arc of the story to a conclusion and set up the next one. Right now I think that there will be two more story arcs, but that's subject to change as I write the damn thing. But since it's moving away from the episodic, the whole thing needs a name, and since I am notoriously crap at naming things, I'm throwing this open to suggestions. (Of course, I'm also crap at taking advice, but never mind that.) What I think I want is something from Jeffrey Foucault's Miles from the Lightning; the lyrics are here. I'm just not sure what I want there, and whether or not I'm crazy. Suggestions and criticism welcome.

(The song is available via the artist's website. I like it.)

So let's say that I was writing a Firefly story (well, a FF crossover, because I never write plain Firefly, and really, why would I when, between the western elements and the space show elements, it's just about the perfect crossover universe for anything that isn't set in a city, and even then you can kind of wing it if you try...) Right, let's try this again. Let's say I was writing a story about Zoe, and that a little while ago I happened on a piece of extended canon which implied that Zoe had been born and raised on a spaceship, and that I was pretty sure this wasn't something ever said on the show or the movie, and that I'm not 100% sure I'm going to use it as backstory here. BUT, all that said, let's say that I'm thinking about it.

The problem it raises for me is this -- if Zoe had grown up on spaceships, what kind of skills does she have to show for it? Wouldn't she pick up piloting, or engine work, or something related to the smooth running of a spaceship? And yet (correct me if I'm wrong), we never see her doing that kind of work. Is this just because she's the second-in-command, and if she had to, she could? Or is this a big continuity gap which I can either ignore or fill with whatever the heck I want to? Or should I just go with character-logic and stick to a background more like Mal's for her?

(To clarify -- I don't usually feel obliged to follow extended-canon, i.e. the stuff that comes up in commentaries and interviews and tie-in novels. I will if it's useful to me, though, and this is a potentially useful piece of background to me. It's just that right now it's causing me more problems than it's fixing.)

Another drabble. Gen, all audiences, pre-series

Title: Phantom
Summary: Dean isn't the only one who misses Sam.

( 100 words )

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So I was thinking about drabble-writing, because it's a little new to me. ( and here follow well more than 100 words about writing drabbles, and writing this drabble in particular, including an early version of this one. )

That's probably far more than you really needed to know about how I write these things.

twinkledru was thinking about Mary Sue, and loligo asked about original character romances. I've said what I have to say about both of these issues more than once, but I did start thinking a bit about writing. In fact I started thinking about putting my money where my mouth is and writing a story with a main character OC.

The first story I finished and posted was a Krycek/OFC romance. Well, romance might be pushing things -- the conspiracy was the A-plot -- but they did have sex. Twice, which may be a record for Krycek in my stories. (Alex Krycek: killing people to avoid thinking about his sexual frustration in Vanzetti's stories since 1999.) Anyway, it struck me as a reasonable thing to do; I don't really buy the idea that Krycek's primary emotional ties are to Mulder or Scully, and we see so little of the character that it seemed logical to me that he'd have some life beyond what we saw in the show. I started to consider what that life might be like and the next thing I knew I had a handful of original characters and a moderately plausible backstory. I'm still fond of those stories, but I'm not sure I want to go back to them; every now and then I think about transposing the OCs to an Alias story or an Alias/XF crossover, probably without the romance. And since then I've moved away from writing main character OCs. I do write crossovers, and I find it interesting that for some readers, a crossover might as well be an OC story -- I know that not all the people who read my crossovers know both fandoms. And crossovers do some of the same work that main character OC stories do, as well: they shed new light on and provide new context for the canon characters. But since one of my problems with the term "Mary Sue" is that it discourages more experienced writers from writing main character OCs and especially OC romances, I feel vaguely guilty about neglecting the genre in favor of the crossover. In XF, my interest shifted to the Krycek/Marita relationship, and then XF canon happened, and I still have issues. Someday, though. I'm going to write my grand unified theory of Sark story, and that's going to need OCs -- the difference is that Sark needs to form associations with characters outside of canon because he needs to get away from the Bristow-Derevko nexus of doom if he's ever going to become an independent person. Provided he survives the end of the series, at any rate. And I'm not entirely sure what kind of character and situation would best allow him to separate himself from the canon characters.

This was going to be a long post about the kind of canon characters for whom it's easiest to imagine an OC romance, but I got tired, and I expect that you can all fill in the blanks from what I've written above.

I've seen this one around, here and there.

I think that these are my ten favorite titles of my own stories (my god, what awkward grammar!)

Advice for the Love-Lorn Double Agent
Articled to Error
Double Nostos
Joy, Watchfulness, Wishing
Lectio Difficilior
Lee Shore
A Lifetime of Empty Rooms
Parallel Catastrophes
This is Agamemnon
Unwritten Life

As an aside, the best title I've never used in a story is "The Contents of a Dovecote." The phrase comes from this passage at the end of Dunnett's To Lie With Lions, which would serve as the summary or the heading:

"He had, of course, sold everything else. It was what he was trained for.

"It did not occur to him, because he was still in some ways inexperienced, that there are some things -- the contents of a dovecote, for instance -- which cannot be sold. For as the soul to the body, the birds will find their way back to their master."

Really, there is no character I write or am interested in writing to whom that quotation could not be applied.


Two passages from works currently in progress:

1. And now she was dead, apparently by her own hand. I didn't believe it for a minute: suicide was the decent thing, and whatever else one might say of Julia, she'd never been decent. Any other woman, faced with the death of her father, the murder of her son and the ruin of her last hope of political power, might have composed herself to imitate Brutus' Porcia, but not Julia. She'd always despised that kind of self-satisfied virtue.

2. A gardener comes twice a week to keep the jungle out. Once she would have checked under every stone after his visits; now the only bugs she cares about are the scorpions that make their way into the bodega. Those she crushes with such a lack of fear and mercy that her neighbors sometimes run to get her when they find scorpions under their own furniture.

From doing this meme, I have learned two things. First, that I have far, far too many works in progress, and second that it's been far, far too long since I updated my web page.

Just before I went away, suelac posted an interesting essay on her discomfort with literary fanfiction; I've been thinking about the issue ever since, if only to try to understand why I don't consider my Harry Potter fanfiction different from my XF or Alias writing.

( much blathering below this about Tolkien and Homer )

( but you know, there is a problem )