La Vie De TKP: the rodeo chapter

[lettered]

It's time for me to speak up...about meat and milkshakes and mwriting! Look at my malliteration! Go me!

So yesterday I was looking forward to a day of vampire porn, this mustard apple porkchop recipe I wanted to try, and (*flips through planner*) oh look, more vampire porn, when my BFF calls and starts talking about the rodeo. I think it's understandable that it took a moment to orient myself. Not Anne Hathaway in a sassy little hat. Not Angel riding Xander the bronc and worst of all, not Lorna. No, the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. So anyway, out of the blue my friend suggests we go. By out of the blue I mean we'd planned it for weeks, and by suggested I mean "let's meet at 3.30". (By friend I really do mean "friend". Yis.)

So, we go to the rodeo. Actually we go to Starbucks, but same difference really. Come to think of it, the rodeo is actually just like the Renaissance Festival (which is actually nothing like Starbucks. I don't deconstruct your segues!): people dress up, act old timey, and best of all: cater meat on a stick. Sausage on a stick, BBQ on a stick, shrimp on a stick, shrimp creole, shrimp gumbo, pineapple shrimp, lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup--oops, Bubba, wrong list. *rifles* Ah--brisket on a stick, scallops on a stick, and my new favorite: pizza on a stick. Yes folks, pizza. On a stick. I fucking love this earth.

In fact, yesterday for dinner? I had fried Oreos, a milkshake, and tater tots. I got the milkshake and the taters (PO-TAT-TOES! Boil 'em mash 'em stick 'em in a stew. How many lists of ways to cook different foods ARE there in cinema?) at the House of Pies but still. Fried Oreos. Actually, as for that, give 'em to us rrraw and wrrrriggling. You can't taste the Oreos for the fried. It's like a cookie inside a funnel cake without the cookie. hannasus claims the fried cookie dough is good, but alas, I couldn't find it. The other delicacy we didn't enjoy was eating brisket in front of the cows. It's a time honored tradition amongst me and my friends, but we just didn't have time. Those poor baby cows. Why do they have to taste so good?

The cowboys were very interesting. One of them wore a pink shirt with sparkly purple fringe on his chaps. Kroger and I.W. Marks won the wagon race. A lady in a sparkly purple (it was a theme) unitard (I wish unitards had been a theme) rode on a horse standing up with fireworks and the Texas flag. When they did that cattle roping thing with the kids, this one gal kept the calf pinned by keeping its head between her legs, but when they interviewed her her eyes were desperate and filmed over with tears, so we only laughed very hard on the inside and made noises of crooning sympathy on the outside, except when we were laughing on the outside too. Poor girl.

Maroon 5 was playing, and I think that one song is alright, but I didn't know they did that other song, you know, the song that really sucks? I had no idea that was them. But my eyes were transfixed by the shininess of the lead singer's buckle, which I think established a rapport between itself and my shining eyes. For some moments there, there was no one in that stadium but me and that buckle. Then, what should intrude upon my consciousness but the gleaming, glowing grill, the one the vendor had on his teeth and that was winking, winking, illuminating my tears of wonder into not only a glistening stop-light red, but gumball blue and orange as well.

This, this grill, that buckle, my shimmering eyes--this is what rodeo is. It's not about winning or losing or meat on a stick. It's not about stagecoach font or pig-racing or cows sniffing your genitals. It's not about the longness of Jack Gyllenhal's eyelashes or even the blondness of Robert Redford's hair. It's all about the shiny. Tacky commercialism, cowboys, and hey, enjoying yourself. Holy trinity, baby. *single perfect tear*

So anyway, the Maroon 5 guy, after making the transcriber spell onomonopea (sp?), says, "let's wrap up with a song by one of my favorite artists." And I say, "you're not going to play Neil Young so who gives a hardened yet strangely crumbly cow chip?" And then he played, "Rockin' In The Free World." Victor Hugo once said that it is no coincidence that the root of "irony" is "iron", and he musta knew something because boy was that irony burnished last night. Between that and the buckle and that grill I mentioned I was kinda blinded.

Then, House of Pies. It was a good day, I'm telling you.

*


So, I was talking to l_aurens and we got to talking about collaborative fics. I always thought it would be interesting to try one (sekrit message to a2zmom: OMG we have to!) but one thing I'm afraid of is that I'll be too picky and want to take over the whole thing. Anyone else have this fear?

Those of you who have written collabortive fics, how do you do it? One person writes one chapter?--How do you keep track of where the plot is going? (Or are you like, evil to each other, and leave a chapter with a cliff-hanger the next person has to resolve?) One person writes one character?--Then who writes the in-between stuff, and doesn't it feel back-and-forth? Who edits? Do you do it over im? How does that work, anyway?

And how have these experiences worked out for y'all? Did you quit? Did you keep going, dissatisfied, knowing you'd never do it again? Would you do it again? Was it an edifying experience?

And does anyone approach reading cowritten fics differently? Who reads them guessing who wrote what? (*raises hand*)

Comments

[rahirah]

Actually, in a way, all my EQ stories were collaborative to a degree, because they were all written in shared-world writing groups. Everyone in the group would create a character, and the founder of the group would usually create a background and history for the tribe, to which other members would contribute. Everything your character did could affect the other characters (so there were some rules, like you can't kill off other people's characters, and if you're going to do something major like drop a meteor on the tribe, you have to get the founder's OK first.) I would constantly get story ideas from things other people did, and we'd work out all kinds of interactions between the characters which became background for stories.

And then there's Three Deep, which is like no other collaboration I've ever seen. We had a months-long brainstorming session about all the things we'd like to see in a virtual season. Then I took all those ideas and tried to put them into one coherent story outline. I broke the outline into episodes, and the episodes into acts, and the acts into scenes. Scenes were assigned to all the writers in the project. When all the scenes for an episode are completed, all of us go over it and make editorial comments, and then the writers turn in a second draft. At some point, the entire manuscript is handed over to me, and I revise with an eye to making it read like it wasn't written by seventeen different people. (At least, that's the theory. In practice, assorted horrible calamities have resulted in significant deviations from that plan.) We're still making changes in the way we do this, and by ep 7, we're hoping to be working on a more round-robin first draft model-a lot of the problems we've had in past epiosdes are due to writers working in a vaccuum, without a good feel for where their scene fits in the larger story. Hoepfully the new method will remedy that.

[tkp.livejournal.com]

EQ

I'm continually fascinated by how you say this fandom works. Since everything the other characters do affects your character, did you have to take turns writing? Or could you kind of follow your own plot with your own character? The latter sounds really interesting--more like bits and pieces coexisting to create a world rather than a single linear plot. I'm just not sure I can see how it'd work. But it sounds fun!

And then there's Three Deep, which is like no other collaboration I've ever seen.

I hadn't heard of that until lilianmorgan mentioned it above! It sounds fascinating...I can't wait to read.

And it sounds like a really complicated project with a really interesting approach. It's too bad the assigned scenes method didn't work out so well--it would be interesting to see how they all fit together if they wrote them without seeing the lead up, but yeah, I would think that would result in a whole lot of disconnect.

Another commentor above mentioned they had to change their method of collaboration part way through...I'm guessing most of us just feel our way through and attempt different ways of doing it until we find a rhythm.

Thanks for explaining how you've handled this! Both fascinating and helpful.

[rahirah]

How we wrote... well, first off, when you joined a holt (which is what we called the fan club/writing groups, because it was the name of a elvish settlement in the comics--I belonged to Daystar Holt and Tower Mountain Holt and Great Water Holt and so forth, and had different characters and storylines going in each) you got the background from the holt coordinator. It would say something like "Tower Mountain is an isolated enclave of early-generation elves ruled by the mad anti-healer Lord Tyaar. They are artistically and technologically advanced, woshipped as gods by a tribe of humans, and control a small tribe of trolls who supply them with weapons in exchanged for food. Intrigue is rife in the Tower. Most Tower elves are artists, living a life of leisure and aspiring to become a member of the Declared, Tyaar's elite. The exceptions are the hawkriders, Tyaar's guard, who are the only elves to contact the outside world." You also get brief descriptions of the existing characters, and a guide to what you can and can't do in creating new characters, i.e. "The commonest magic talents in Tower Mountain are sending and gliding; no more healers, please. Remember no childen have been born in the Tower for two thousand years; your character should be at least twenty-five hundred years old." And like that. And most important, you'd get a timeline of the important events which had happened or were scheduled to happen.

You were expected to create a character sheet describing your character's looks, personality, history, relatives, etc. Depending on the holt, this could be anything from a paragraph long to six or seven detailed pages. You were also expected to make sure that the coordinator knew about important events in your character's life, so they could be added to the timeline.

Once your character was OK'd by the coordinator, you were encouraged to contact other members and connect your character to theirs: "Hi, I have a new hawkrider character, and I see you also have a hawkrider character about the same age. I have an idea for a story about them going through training together..."

So you'd write your story, and contact the other members whose characters you used to get their OKs on what their characters did (how much OK you needed depended on the holt) and then send it in to the coordinator, who checked it to make sure it didn't conflict with other stories in progress, did any editing required, sent it back for rewrites if necessary, etc. and finally your story would be published in the holt zine. And someone would see it and go, "Hey, if they stole that sword from the trolls, what would happen if some young troll decided to make a name for himself by braving the upper world to get it back...?

And it just built like that. The coordinator was responsible for making sure things didn't go wildly off the rails, and keeping people from bumping into each other, and settling conflicts.

[tkp.livejournal.com]

I have a bunch of comments stashed up I didn't have time to reply to for one reason or another, and I have time now, so that's why I'm replying to this out of the blue and so late:

Thanks for explaining! This sounds really cool. dodyskin elsewhere was talking about doing a Jossverse fic wiki, or something like that, which sounds really similar to how this went...the idea as a whole is not a linear story but rather a world to play in, where anyone can add anything they want (as long as it fits within the parameters of the world). I wish I was gung-ho (and coordinated!) enough to organize, or even participate in something like that. It seems like it could become so huge so fast, and I'm so anal that I would want to read EVERYTHING, and try to read it in some kind of ORDER (preferrably chronological), before I wrote anything, and so never write anything!

Thanks again for your explanation. It's a new way of thinking about participating in fandom and is giving me thoughts to chew on.