Fandom and Writing and Tea and Books.

For no good reason that I can articulate, I’ve been looking through my old LJ posts and I found this excerpt of a Cary Tennis column from Salon.com in 2007. I absolutely adore his elegiac defense of the appeal and value of fanfic.

Nov.  2, 2007 |    Dear Cary,

I am in my 30s, finished my Ph.D. dissertation recently, teaching classes at universities, applying for jobs, and have two kids under 10 years old with my husband. In fact, I should be too busy to be writing to you.

The problem is that I’m addicted to fan fiction. Especially a small fraction of online fan fiction, with which you may or may not be familiar, but has a fanatical group of followers. Yes, I’m an HP fan-fiction groupie. I know that there are various fan-fiction communities online, but I’ve been addicted with the Harry Potter fandom ever since I couldn’t wait for Book 5 to come out and started searching for any news about it on the Internet.

Now this has become a serious habit – on good days, I simply check out a few of my favorite fan-fiction sites and skim the updated stories (you know, some of them run for 50 to 60 chapters); on bad days, I go through the forums and read the comments and recommendations until I find something that piques my interest, and will not stop until I’m done with that story. If I don’t find anything I like, I search until I do, or get mad, or end up clicking through dozens of sites, which will inevitably leave me frustrated. (Salon is one of them, sorry – what do you expect, in the current political atmosphere?)

How did I manage to survive so far? My husband does not know of my habit, nor do my kids; although with my elder one, we read the books together and sometimes discuss Harry Potter; I sometimes try to explain some concepts to my child using Harry or Ron as an example – nothing extraordinary. But once I’m alone at home, I’ll start clicking, and I can’t stop. Only when I’m out of the house, working where someone else is present, have I been able to do my other work, and that’s how I’ve been able to manage my workload so far.

I’ve tried to understand my fascination with this; I think partly it’s the “magic,” a wonderful concept for the imagination. Also I’m a Ron/Hermione shipper (a term that means I’m happy with their relationship), and the stories surrounding the Ron/Hermione dynamics are sometimes so poignant, I tend to fall in love all over with the characters and become so envious of their (imagined) relationship. There are a lot of good stories, mind you, quite a few geared toward the over-19 group, but I’m not really picky about what I read, as long as it’s well structured and well written and not OOC (that’s Out Of Character). I’ve never participated in the forums or written fan fiction myself, but I sometimes dream about it – I feel like I know the writers better than some of my friends.

I’ve tried cutting off the Internet, not staying home when I’m alone, limiting myself to a certain amount of time, but they haven’t worked. Do I need psychological help or therapy? Am I secretly harboring some type of dissent with my current life and expressing it through this destructive pattern of Web surfing? Or am I just procrastinating and not motivated enough to get my arse back to work?

Ardent R/H Shipper

Dear Ardent R/H Shipper,

Is it not starkly emblematic of our barren, frigid Puritanism, hostile to dreamers, that you must hide from your husband, your co-workers and even your children in order to indulge your imagination? Is it you, I’m saying, or is it the world you’re living in? Addicted? Full of shame? Shame about what? You say it hasn’t killed you yet? No, it’s keeping you alive, I dare say. This isn’t some heroin full of impurities that is going to jam up your lungs and give you abscesses on your injection spots; this isn’t some shameful, basement vodka-drinking, passed-out-mom situation, your blouse fouled with vomit and your limbs askew near the drain at the damp, low spot in the concrete floor. This isn’t some manic-depressive speed-freak hell where you find the formerly distinguished chair of language studies at Eminent Ivy Inc. quaking on the bare pine floorboards of an SRO in the Bowery.

This is more the secret reading-and-scribbling indulgence of a Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson, it seems to me, in an age both more crass and more straitlaced than theirs, if such a thing is even possible.

Maybe you are secretly harboring some type of dissent. If so, good for you! Some frowning, malnourished psychiatrist in itchy wool tweed, summoned by the concerned, might drive out in his Buick LeSabre and pronounce you maladjusted. Hallelujah if he does, I’d say. Hallelujah if he does! Let the world diagnose you as seriously maladjusted. To me you stand as a testament to the survival of a fragile innocence in a world that has grown ever more barbaric, and that even now is feeding its young to fascistic engines of domination solely so that future generations, if they survive the heat, can be even more barbaric, domineering and philistine than we are. Yes, if your imagination survives the clitorectomy of the Ph.D., if you run the academic gantlet of hungry Pilgrim hands and survive their tearing nails, more power to you. They may leave you out in the snow to freeze, or brand you as a heretic, but some feeble survivors of the purge will be applauding, albeit silently, not daring even to show our faces in the window.

I mean what, exactly, is the problem? That you pursue this in secret? That it feels out of control? And why do you pursue it in secret? Is it shamefully lowbrow and secular? Is it not the high, striving, virtuous text approved by the academy? Is it not the wifely, dutiful rack you are supposed to be stretched out on, the Pilgrim’s wheel of commerce and progress where you are supposed to be laboring when you are not cleaning house and suckling the young? I suggest you examine the setting here, and look for the character’s motivation. Why is this your problem and not the world’s?

If you yourself were a character in one of these plots, would your pursuit of secret pleasure in words brand you as evil and wrong? Or rather would there not be intense identification with you across the land, as people just like you are seeking the same thing, something ancient and bright, some artifact of a true, untrammeled soul with its innocent need for narrative, something mythlike and linear in a world of exploded stories. And who could blame you for crossing the line, when the fences between reader and text and writer have rotted and fallen anyway, when we are all enmeshed like strangers on a train in the same humming engine of creation and retelling?

One of the best dance routines I’ve ever watched.

Victor

Since NaNo is coming very soon let’s play a lil’ tag game

Describe how prepared/ready you are for NaNo with am image, video, or gif then tag some peeps!

I’ll go first;

“kill it,” the captain says, but the ice is melting in his eyes.

“we can’t,” the first mate says desperately, praying she won’t have to fight her captain on this. “we can’t. we - i won’t. we won’t.”

“i know.”

x

“daddy,” she says, floating in a tub of seawater in the hold, “daddy, la-la, la-la-la.”

her voice rings like bells. her accent is strange; her mouth isn’t made for human words. it mesmerises even the hardiest amongst them and she wasn’t even trying. the crew has taken to diving for shellfish near the shorelines for her; she loves them, splitting the shells apart with strength seen in no human toddler, slurping down the slimy molluscs inside and laughing, all plump brown cheeks and needle-sharp teeth. she sometimes splashes them for fun with her smooth, rubbery brown tail. even when they get soaked they laugh. they love her.

“daddy,” she calls again, and he can hear the worry in her voice. the storm rocking the ship is harsh and uncaring, and if they go down, she would be the only survivor.

“don’t worry,” he says, and goes over, sitting next to the tub. the first mate, leaning against the wall, pretends not to notice as he quietly begins to sing.

x

“father,” she says, one day, as she leans on the edge of the dock and the captain sits next to her, “why am I here?”

“your mother abandoned you,” he says, as he always has. “we found you adrift, and couldn’t bear to leave you there.”

she picks at the salt-soaked boards, uncertain. her hair is pulled back in a fluffy black puff, the white linen holding it slipping almost over one of her dark eyes. one of her first tattoos, a many-limbed kraken, curls over her right shoulder and down her arm, delicate tendrils wrapped around her calloused fingertips. “alright,” she says.

x

“why am I really here?” she asks the first mate, watching the sun set over the water in streaks of liquid metal that pooled in the troughs of the waves and glittered on the seafoam.

“we didn’t know any better,” the first mate says, staring into the water. “we didn’t know- we didn’t know anything. we didn’t understand why she fought so viciously to guard her treasure. we could not know she protected something a thousand times more precious than the purest gold.”

she wants to be furious, but she can’t. she already knew the answer, from reading the guilt in her father’s eyes and the empty space in her own history. and she can’t hate her family.

“it’s alright,” she says. “i do have a family, anyways. i don’t think i would have liked my other life near as much.”

x

her kraken grows, spreading its tendrils over her torso and arms. she grows too, too large to come on board the ship without being hauled up in a boat from the water. she sings when the storms come and swims before the ship to guide it to safety. she fights off more than one beast of the seas, and gathers a set of scars across her back that she bears with pride. “i don’t mind,” she says, when the captain fusses over her, “now i match all of you.”

the first time their ship is threatened, really threatened, is by another fleet. a friend turned enemy of the first mate. “we shouldn’t fight him,” she says, peering through the spyglass.

“why not?” the mermaid asks.

“he’ll win,” the first mate says.

the mermaid tips her head sideways. Her eyes, dark as the deep waters, gleam in the noon light. “are you sure?” she asks.

x

the enemy fleet surrenders after the flagship is sunk in the night, the anchor ripped off the ship and the planks torn off the hull. the surviving crew, wild-eyed and delirious, whimper and say a sea serpent came from the water and attacked them, say it was longer than the boat and crushed it in its coils. the first mate hears this and has to hide her laughter. the captain apologizes to his daughter for doubting her.

“don’t worry,” she says, with a bright laugh, “it was fun.”

x

the second time, they are pushed by a storm into a royal fleet. they can’t possibly fight them, and they don’t have the time to escape.

“let me up,” the mermaid urges, surfacing starboard and shouting to the crew. “bring me up, quickly, quickly.”

they lower the boat and she piles her sinous form into it, and uses her claws to help the crew pull her up. once on the deck she flops out of the boat and makes her way over to the bow. the crew tries to help but she’s so heavy they can barely lift parts of her.

she crawls up out in front of the rail and wraps her long webbed tail around the prow. the figurehead has served them well so far but they need more right now. she wraps herself around the figurehead and raises her body up into the wind takes a breath of the stinging salt air and sings.

the storm carries her voice on its front to the royal navy. they are enchanted, so stunned by her song that they drop the rigging ropes and let the tillers drift. the pirates sail through the center of the fleet, trailing the storm behind them, and by the time the fleet has managed to regain its senses they are buried in wind and rain and the pirates are gone.

x

she declines guns. instead she carries a harpoon and its launcher, and uses them to board enemy ships, hauling her massive form out of the water to coil on the deck and dispatch enemies with ruthless efficiency. her family is feared across all the sea.

x

“you know we are dying,” the captain says, looking down at her.

she floats next to the ship, so massive she could hold it in her arms. her eyes are wise.

“i know,” she says, “i can feel it coming.”

the first mate stands next to the captain. she never had a lover or a child, and neither did he, but to the mermaid they are her parents. she will always love her daughter. the tattoos are graven in dark swirls across the mermaid’s deep brown skin and the flesh of her tail, even spiraling onto the spiked webbing on her spine and face. her hair is still tied back, this time with a sail that could not be patched one last time.

“we love you,” the first mate says simply, looking down. her own tightly coiled black hair falls in to her face; she shakes the locs out of the way and smiles through her tears. the captain pretends he isnt crying either.

“i love you too,” the mermaid says, and reached up to pull the ship down just a bit, just to hold them one last time.

“guard the ship,” the captain says. “you always have but you know they’re lost without you.”

“without you,” the mermaid corrects, with a shrug that makes waves. “what will we do?”

“i don’t know,” the captain says. “but you’ll help them, won’t you?”

“of course i will,” she scoffs, rolling her eyes. “i will always protect my family.”

x

the captain and the first mate are gone. the ship has a new captain, young and fearless - of the things she can afford to disregard. she fears and loves the ocean, as all captains do. she does not fear the royal fleet. and she does not fear the mermaid.

“you know, i heard stories about you when i was a little girl,” she says, trailing her fingers in the water next to the dock.

the mermaid stares at her with one eye the size of a dinner table. “is that so?” she hums, smirking with teeth sharper than the swords of the entire navy.

“they said you could sink an entire fleet and that you had skin tougher than dragon scales,” the new captain says, grinning right back at the monster who could eat her without a moment’s hesitation. “i always thought they were telling tall tales.”

“and now?”

“they were right,” the new captain says. “how did they ever befriend you?”

And as the angel and the demon unit’d in the safety of the dark

the metallic carriage hath opened itself up to the sky

letting the stars shine upon the lovers

while playing a sweet sonnet sung by the Queen herself

Based on this post.

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