#fuzzy-paint

no list, a lot of LISTen(s/ings)

liar:

“It hurt to think about even now so he tries to focus on the fact that Rey made it out, Chewie made it out. Finn takes the water Poe gives him and think of Rey. She’s okay, Poe said, and Poe doesn’t seem like a liar.” -- which ok idek if this is a WIP bc it’s more like coda scene to tfa i never finished and probably won’t ever post. 

it also showed up in this:

““No,” she whispers, feeling unsteady on her feet. Heimdall reaches out and steadies her. He’s looking at her like he can’t quite believe she’s there. Like she’s a ghost. “I am sorry, Lady Jane.”There’s such sympathy in his eyes and it cuts Jane down. Heimdall is not a liar. He does not lie.” -- which is from the 100 yrs fic WHICH I WILL FINISH ONE DAY

I KNOW, I LOVE EVERYONE ON THAT SHIP 

H - What is your favorite source text for fandom stuff (e.g., TV shows, movies, books, anime, Western animation, etc.)?

I would have to say movies. This is mostly due to their length; they’re much shorter, in total time and content, than books and TV or anime series or games, and so typically it doesn’t take as much time to get into them and their worlds aren’t as fully developed. The time-commitment is part of it but the open-ended nature is key because it means there’s a lot more room for interpretation. This is also part of why I dislike extra-canon materials like comics (when the source isn’t a comic) and websites with background info and extended universes of books. I vastly prefer for everyone’s imaginations to be able to run wild in an open area without a bunch of stuff to absorb to be considered canon.

E - Have you added anything cracky/hilarious to your fandom? If so, what?

I thankfully keep my crack mostly on my computer and not out in the public where anyone can see it and I can be embarrassed by it. >.> But Jane Foster and the Impossible Library is pretty crack-y, as is Sexiest ‘Something’ Alive, if I’m being honest with myself. The rest lives in a black hold folder on my computer and hopefully will never escape. :)

Y - What are your secondhand fandoms (i.e., fandoms you aren’t in personally but are tangentially familiar with because your friends/people on your dash are in them)?

A fair number of Marvel’s current comics, like Jane!Thor and Sam!Cap, a couple DC comics like the new Grayson book, Jane the Virgin, pre-Moffat Dr. Who, Elementary, Game of Thrones in the past (not so much now, I think everyone’s sick of it at this point, which I can’t blame them for!).

I thought it might be difficult!

This is hilarious, I had to scour my WiP directory, like opening each project. And there’s only one in which this word appears. Ha.

It’s the second part of Nothing’s Wrong When Nothing’s True, which is apt since the AoS premiere was last night. 

***

There's no sand this time, which makes it difficult for her to gauge how hard she's pushing as she flattens her hands on the clammy ground. She thinks of the word he used, though: tap. Like tapping a glass to make water shiver, or tapping an aquarium to harass the fish, or tapping something hollow to hear the echoes inside. Tap. Tap. Tap.

Thank you for the ask. :D

12: Who is your favorite author?

I don’t really have a single favorite author. So many of them do amazing things I like. For example I don’t care much for Diana Gabaldon’s plots or character arcs, but the mechanics of her writing are incredibly spot on. I love the emotion and self-examination in Ursula Le Guin’s books. I’m an enormous fan of Peter S. Beagle’s worlds and how he explores them without ever worldbuilding at you in gigantic walls of exposition, and at the same time he can evoke a depth of emotion in a very few small exchanges. And Michael Chabon, oh wow, he writes such a strong character voice, and I’m not usually into first person either.

I don’t even think I can say a given author informs my writing the most either. It just depends on whom I’ve been reading the most lately.

16: How do you feel about movies based on books?

I like them in a general sense, though each specific case has its own pros and cons. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m an atrociously slow reader, so I get a lot out of adaptations for particularly long works like Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, movies are so prone to whitewashing and erasure of PoC and disabled characters and characters in non-heteronormative relationships that the adaptations can be more harmful than not (looking at you, Hunger Games). And sometimes a good book will just adapt poorly due to some narrative mechanic or the nature of its plot. Or maybe it could, but the method the movie makers choose doesn’t work. 

I think it comes down to the production company and the director and the casting agency, in the end. They make or break the adaptation.

18: How do you feel about love triangles?

I hate them.

There’s almost no exception to this rule. I mean I think I could come up with one if I tried, but it would be Rube Goldergian in the extreme. Love triangles are very nearly always a vehicle to be shitty about some of the characters–typically the ones who don’t deserve it and are least represented in media, i.e. women and PoC and WoC in particular–and exalt some sort of damaging and disgusting idea about love and trust and devotion.

Related, I also hate how infidelity in love triangles is so often portrayed as ‘no big deal’ and something the person being cheated on needs to just 'get over’. That’s how I know a writer is a gigantic infant who’s probably never been cheated on.

Thank you for the ask. :)

4. Answered here!

6. thoughts on critique

IMO critique is good and a necessary thing for developing one’s skills as a writer. Constructive, of course; silliness like ‘ermagerd u suk loki would nvr do that!!!11!!1’ or even well-articulated bashing is just people being petty and childish. However even with good, constructive criticism I think the critic has to be aware of which among their reactions are based on personal bias vs. what is simple a continuity problem or a worldview mismatch or awkward phrasing, etc. Awareness of how one’s own experiences in life effect one’s reaction to media are super important in critquing it. For example, I am intensely critical of Maya Hansen’s 'But sure you can call me a botanist’ line from IM3, a bit most people probably didn’t notice or care about, because of my professional background. Other people might not care; that’s okay and no failing of them as a critic. They’re not coming at it from a personal history relating to the topic.

I don’t actually agree with fandom’s stance on unsolicited concrit being verboten, because it results in a large number of fanfic writers’ never really improving, but I also get the reason it exists. A lot of people just make fic to relax and have a hobby, and to compare it to my amateur photography you can be assured if someone came to me critiquing my pictures of butterball chipmunks on treestumps or moths on my garage you can bet I’d respond with, “Well you’re certainly entitled to your wrong opinion.”

10. what are your strengths wrt writing?

I avoid heavy exposition, which is a strength in that it means I’m less inclined to go on and on and on in settings where that would be out of context. I don’t personally think exposition is always bad, though I do think few people know how to actually do it correctly when they first begin as a writer. They see reams of expository text by their favorite authors and emulate it–nothing wrong with emulating what you like–except, exposition can easily bore someone and be a huge turn off. At the start of a story, where you have about 5-10 sentences to get their attention and keep it, this is a bad thing to do. Related: no purple prose.

I think I’m probably pretty okay with dialogue, because (as mentioned below) I’m a talker and I…I won’t say I obssess over it, but I examine how people talk and try to find ways to bring it across in a written text. I’m very interested in how to write dialogue and make someone really hear it (not all the time, though, because in some works it’s not necessary), because in TV and movie fandoms that’s a lot of the work’s context. Said is my friend. Dialogue tag adverbs are on a tight leash.

Research. I have my professional career to thank for this, but I research the shit out of anything I’m writing. I don’t care if it’s a fandom piece. I read whole books on a single subject to do so.

11. what are your weaknesses wrt writing?

I am slow. Like, really slow. I consider this a weakness because it means I can often lose the thread of something I want to write before I get it on a page. This is tied to how I am an intensely slow reader, and I re-read everything I write, like, one billion times. That in turn causes me to memorize my story too much, so I lose track of where the reader might be in their own reading of it and what I might need to reinforce.

I typically write out of order, and any other out-of-order writers will probably know this means I might have a scene in mind and wind up trying to make a fic produce that scene. Sometimes this is totally okay but sometimes it’s not and the fic winds up being shoehorned. It’s hard to recognize that when it’s happening until after I’ve spent a few days/weeks going 'why can I not hook this into the rest’. It also means I have to do a few full rereads to remind myself of my continuity, or I’ll wind up with stranded sentences of things which were changed/removed. It also means I have to do a lot of 'stitching together’ and this is a very excruciating process.

I obssess too much over body language and physical gestures. One of my editing passes is actually a 'remove excessive physical gestures/references’ pass, that’s how bad I am about it.

I fall into sentence length and cadence patterns easily, so on anything >2k I do a full editing pass which is just looking for this.

I am hypersensitive to word repetition, so I wind up trying hard to avoid it, and that can result in lulz when it comes to word usage.

In terms of any movie/TV show fanfic, I think I’m probably too dialogue focused, though this probably stems from how a lot of the plot movement in films I prefer heavily favors character interaction over physical interaction. Even though I’m writing for action-oriented fandoms, I wind up applying a less action-y writing style to it. (Also, among people I know, I am a talker, so there’s that.)