forget your Unified Theory of Everything

2/5/2010 - 3,328

Title: The Old Ways
Author: tkp
Word Count: 1,500
Pairing: Spock gen
Rating: G
Summary: The old ways are gone.
A/N: Sorry for the delayed repost, for those of you who've seen this.

( The Old Ways )

Hello! I want to say (1) thanks to the awesome people who bought me snowflakes, and to the awesome people who sent me cards. I gave no one on the internets my address this year because I knew I wouldn't mail people stuff and that felt wrong.

(2) Happy holidays! I hope those of you who celebrate had a happy Chanukah, and those of you about to celebrate have a merry Christmas, and that whatever I'm leaving out, it's wonderful.

(3) I've created a super small filter in hopes of actually keeping up with some people. I could not bear to ax my whole flist, because I'd still like to have a clickable list of so many people I'm interested in. But I just can't keep up. Remember, it's always defriending amnesty day in tkp. I hope to do the moving-to-Dreamwidth thing one day (eventually), but I will still crosspost.

(4)

I never really understood the point of fanmixes until I heard stoney321's fanmix for the character Connor from Angel. This fanmix worked for me because the songs weren't about Connor over-all; they were about specific moments in Connor's life. Maybe most fanmixes are like that (please point me to the ones that are), but the ones I've heard and seen tend to be general songs about who the character is over-all or how someone feels about a 'ship. Stoney's, OTOH, mix gave me specific things I could recognize and connect to.

There are soft, thoughtful songs about family in the beginning, at Connor's birth. Then there are loud scary songs about torture and survival, when Connor goes to a Hell dimension. But the songs have less concrete references to what was going on in these moments of the characters life, than they do interpretations of what was going on. I mean, a song doesn't have to sound like hell to be about Hell. Anyway, when I listen to this fanmix, I feel like I'm getting the story of the character, and for me it's as cool as watching the show. I love this fanmix, and am eternally grateful to Stoney for making it.

Another thing arranging the fanmix by moments in the character's life does is make the mix extremely varied. There's classical music, church music, Johnny Cash, Metallica, and Radiohead on this mix. This mix also introduced me to songs and artists and covers that I hadn't heard before. I've always wished I could have this fanmix experience for other characters I know and love, and then I started thinking--if we opened this up we could get some really diverse choices for pieces that fit a character, AND we could introduce each other to new music.

( So let's make a fanmix like this for Spock Prime. )

Title: When The Enterprise Had Kittens
Length: ~2,000
Rating: G
Summary: Kittens aboard the Enterprise.
A/N: Following in the vein of loving to see the subject of characters getting pets treated seriously, I bring you a fic inspired by this prompt on st_xi_kink. I wrote it in about an hour, which is sort of a record for me.

( When The Enterprise Had Kittens )

Title: Girls Are Great
Fandom: Star Trek (probably XI), Kirk/Girl!Spock, Uhura
Disclaimer: ST isn’t mine. There’s one line from Wikipedia and several choice phrases by stultiloquentia in here.
Rating: NC-17, for explicit sex, and very dirty talk
Warnings: Porn. Meta. Porn.
Summary: Girl gets off. Girl thinks about getting off. Girl gets off again. Girl just happens to be Spock, who used to be a guy.

part 1
( Girls Are Great part 2 )

When I write, I do it because something in my gut needs to say something. Often with fanfic, it's saying, "I need to get these characters together!" or "I need to see what happens next!" But whatever the need is, I always get to a point in the writing where I start thinking about it. Lots of time the thinky thoughts--analysis of the need, thoughts about why this should exist, ideas about purpose--stymie my process. I suddenly have to rehaul everything I've written, because it's become more. It's not just my need to fulfill intensely personal desires any more, it is a need to say something about universal desire, about our world and myself.

To put it in fanfic terms, I start out writing crack. Then I get caught up in meta. Sometimes I start over so I can just write more crack. Sometimes I start over and just write meta. In rare instances I keep what I have and manage to turn the crack into something meta.

I've often been frustrated by this meta impulse when it comes to fanfic. It is for some people, but for me, fanfic is not that much SRS BIZNESS. It's a chance to satisfy crack impulses, which often involve porn, while my higher brain can be engaged in say, writing original fic. But that's never actually true. Fanfic always turns into SRS BIZNESS for me, whether I like it or not. As I said in my rec of One Thousand Kisses Deep by seraphcelene, the thinkyness is fun. Fandom isn't always just about getting off; it's about analysis and our need to express our own thoughts on the thoughts of others that we consume.

I've been talking a lot to my_daroga about this. We both feel we have Things To Say, which are thoughtful and important and could produce impressive works of well, art. But at the same time we're in this to get our rocks off--I don't even mean we're in it for the porn, but for those intensely personal needs I was talking about. It seems to me like we're both having difficulty reconciling that latter impulse with broader ideals. Which is interesting, because in the end both of these drives are still to satisfy ourselves.

So, has this ever happened to you? Start out writing "for funsies" and have it turn wicked serious? What did you do with that? Did you stop yourself from getting too serious because it's supposed to be "fun"? Or did you start something else that was more serious, or did you allow it to organically become serious? And what was your reaction to the fic changing on you like that? Is this something that only happens with fanfic? What are some links to fic you've written that turned serious somewhere in the process, and is the "transition" visible? Does it happen the other way around--you want to write something poetic and thinky, and it turns out a lark? AM I CRAZY?

Why are there so many spiders in my bed? Seriously, there have been at least two tonight, both the size of silver dollars. Maybe it was the same one.

Spiders are cute! Just not in my bed.

One day, I'd like to post about these things:

1) The lecture I heard once on how Emma is a maturation of Sense and Sensibility.
2) The Gwenyth Paltrow Emma versus the Kate Beckinsale one (*waves flag for latter*)
3) How girls in period costume with modern accoutrement make me feel funny (a la here:
)
4) Whether Romola Garai looks like Katee Sackhoff, a la the great Connor // Jackson Browne debate.
5) How I miss good old days at Republic of Pemberley.
6) Me and Jane Austen! In particular: Emma
7) My hopes for the new BBC Emma, inspired via this picspam!

Courtesy of the lovely redbrickrose, I now have a shiny Dreamwidth account. The username is joy. Plans so far:

1) I'm sticking with LJ until and unless Dreamwidth comes up with a way to subscribe to LJ journals without LJ users having to do anything about it. At such a time, I will:
2) Use Dreamwidth to crosspost and scan the flist. That way everyone who knows me on LJ will still see my posts and can still respond to them, and I will still see everyone I wish to read whether they move or not. At some point in the future, if most people I want to read/people who are reading me have moved to Dreamwidth:
3) I might lock comments so you can only reply here, so I don't have to jump between the two services, but I don't see this happening unless there is mass exodus, which doesn't seem to be happening as yet. So anyway:
4) I won't be worrying about me moving away and not seeing any of you EVER AGAIN, like I totally did that one time. Have I mentioned I hate changing my mind?
5) Instead of doing 15 minute posts I've been trying to do "one concept" posts. Sometimes this takes way longer than 15 minutes, because I have to delete so much. But I save the deletions in a file that hopefully I'll go back to, and hopefully, I'll round out each deleted idea, and make it its own post. That way the posts are short and easy to read, and the comments are short and easy to reply to, and even though the posts take a little longer to make maybe I won't feel like they eat so much time.
6) On Dreamwidth I will also be experimenting and having fun! Woohoo!