Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

I was supposed to get something else done tonight, but the muse (whose taste is far from the best in certain areas) started thinking about this filk on the T and wouldn’t let go until I typed it up for her. I hope that since I indulged her tonight, she’ll write something useful for me tomorrow.

Filk:      It’s My Blog
Original:  It’s My Turn (Diana Ross)

I can’t cover up opinions
In the name of blog
Or keep my peace
In jetc that was easy

And if thinking for myself
Is what I’m guilty of
Go on and disagree
I’ll still be me

It’s my blog
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This blog’s just for me

Because it’s my blog
With no apologies
I won’t tone down the truth
I’ll never try to please

For here it’s my blog
Yes I do have all the answers
Before I blogged, I took my share of stances
Ain’t no use of mailing lists
Where everyone’s the same

No, it’s not disdain
For I don’t know you from Adam
And I’ll tell you so
Here in my Dear Sir or Madam

It’s my blog
With no room for replies
I’ve never seen my fic
Through someone else’s eyes

And here it’s my blog
To try and have my say
And if the muse is blocked
At least I’ve blogged today

It’s my blog
Yes, it’s my blog
Ain’t no use of mailing lists
Where everyone’s the same

No, it’s not disdain
For I don’t know you from Adam
And I’ll tell you so
Here in my Dear Sir or Madam

It’s my blog
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This blog’s just for me

Because it’s my blog
To rant and say “my eye!”
I sure do like to see
That Lori’s stopping by

Because it’s my blog
It’s my blog

It’s my blog
For fanfic and for “fun”
Trying to work out
The thoughts of number one

Yes here it’s my blog
To reach and touch the muse
No one’s gonna say
That I was not amused

It’s my blog
Yes, it’s my blog
It’s my blog
It’s my blog
It’s my blog

In the spirit of being More Like Lori, I edited an entry in the accidental muse war. I did that for myself, because defending myself in my blog, which is what I was doing, was exactly what I stated at the outstart that I didn’t want to have to do. I’m not going to do it now, either, but I did classify this entry Jemima, so I will say something about me. Take it as an open letter to the easily offended.

I accept that other people are not like me. When I write about my own opinions, or my own muse, I am not thereby saying that anyone else is inferior or a bad writer. Unless you can actually quote me saying so, that’s just an assumption on your part. The number of people who make the same baseless assumption is not my concern - I’m a logician, and only logical argument interests me.

The other deep secret of Jemima is that I don’t give a flying fig. Smut does not interest me. Angst does not interest me. The museless, qua museless, do not interest me. Do not mistake me for someone who cares. Specifically, I don’t care whether I’m a better or a worse writer than anyone else.

I get the feeling sometimes that the people who think I’m full of myself (taking that statement at face value, rather than as an observation of my general disinterest) are young people who are blogging, and perhaps writing, for more social reasons than I am. I don’t use fanfic or my blog or my opinions to prove my self-worth, either to myself or to others. I’ve accomplished enough in my life not to need the muse or anything else to bolster my ego. If I read fanfic, it’s because I find it interesting, and if I write down my opinions, it’s because I find them, and the process of formulating them, interesting.

Believe me, it has nothing whatsoever to do with you.

When I was younger and smarter, I
Just Said No To Blogback. Today it’s
time to say no again. The commenting thing was an interesting experiment,
but one that’s not working out. Thank you to the many positive commenters, and
to the few unsatisfied commenters, no hard feelings.

This is not a debate; this is my blog. If you want to debate,
bring it up in zendom or send me email. I have nothing against debate, but it’s
not the purpose of my blog. My blog is my opinions, all the time. Say whatever
you want in your own blogs - have a ball. If I find something interesting,
I may address it here. Or not.

Ok, here you go, an actual scientific theory of the muse, taken from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

According to Jaynes, there are two halves to the human mind, the conscious half, and what I’ll call the non-conscious half. (Subconscious and unconscious are used, and we don’t want any of their unfortunate connotations confusing us, anyway.) In general, you think of yourself as the conscious half, because it is logically impossible to be conscious of any of your non-conscious processes.

You may be aware that something mysterious is going on over there on the right side (usually) of your brain, from other clues, and the truth is, consciousness really doesn’t take up that much of your mental time. Most thinking and processing goes on non-consciously. Jaynes gives some nice examples:

I’ve had this experience myself in mathematics, which is, perhaps, why I recognize it so readily when writing fiction. (My muse is fondest of the Bed and the Bath, though she’s been known to act up on public transportation as well.) Jaynes explains how a certain amount of preparation goes into the process - setting up or contemplating the problem, then putting it aside, after which (one hopes) comes the flash of insight, and finally, the logical justification.

So, without getting into the more debated areas of Jaynes’ theory, we can establish certain facts about the muse. Because the muse is a non-conscious process, it cannot be controlled by the conscious mind, that is, by the writer herself. The muse’s process of creation can be neither “fun” nor painful, because the conscious writer, the only party involved who can feel amusement or pain, is involved in the act of creation purely as a spectator.

Of course, the muse can cause the writer no end of frustration when absent, and when present, can give the writer a feeling of transcendence. The point here is that any conscious writing, whether fun or sweat-and-blood painful, is not from the muse. The muse is, by definion, a non-conscious process. Just as you cannot have fun or feel pain while you are sound asleep, you cannot have fun or feel pain while the muse is producing. As Lori has noted, she may leave you quite a mess to clean up, but editing is not a muse process - it’s the logical justification at the end.

Another point to note about the muse so far is that what she writes is not necessarily better than what some other, conscious writer writes. She is, of course, generally accepted to be smarter than her own writer - she has the best bits of your brain in her non-conscious hands, so of course she’s going to show you up big-time.

Matters are a bit more complicated than this; it can be hard to separate the muse from the man. To do so, we’ll need more theory from Julian Jaynes. Join us next time on Mutual of Jemima’s Wild Fandom…

I had the unusual experience of receiving two feedbacks in two days. Even more unusual, they were both wrong. Do you ever get the wrong feedback? Yes, both people had read something by me, but it wasn’t quite what I’d written - not unlike the unintentional muse war, I suppose.

One person complained that If Ayn Rand Wrote ST:VOY was an absurd misrepresentation of Rand’s views. (That this was a complaint, rather than praise, became clear later in the missive.) Now, whether you think Rand would eliminate the Borg as an evil menace to the galaxy probably depends on whether you think Janeway ought to have done so. This is a familiar question of fanon, usually seen in after-the-fact regrets on Janeway’s part that she let the big one get away. At least, I think it is - it’s certainly a point I’ve hit on more than once, even reusing my favorite line, “The Borg are not a genus.”

So, we can assume this reader was unfamiliar with the Voyager fanon, promise him a fuller disclaimer for parody, and leave it at that. Well, there’s still the question of whether negative feedback goes in my fanmail folder or not. I don’t think I’ve gotten any before. I think I’ll take the ASC Awards approach - any old feedback in a storm.

The second piece of feedback, however, represents a more serious and more frequent misunderstanding. This isn’t the first time Yesterday, When I was Borg has been praised as a parody. I doubt this is an issue of misunderstanding filk itself - filk is not parody [except for legal, disclaimer purposes], and none of my other filks, if they get feedback at all, get feedback praising them qua parody. No, this one is also an issue of the Borg and fanon. “Yesterday” is a tragic filk about Seven’s separation from the Collective. It’s not whiny, as Seven’s number in “Filk of La Mancha” has been accused of being. “Yesterday” deals, in a remote, filky way, with the question of whether it was moral to remove Seven from the Collective - a question Chakotay also half-asked in Scorpion or the Gift.

Few stories deal with the moral issues of Collectivization, but I still consider it a legitimate question of fanon and therefore assume that the people who see parody in my tragedies are just not up on fanon. I think it’s about time I posted Thrive to ASC, just to see if I get similar reactions over the Borg bits. Meg’s Refugee Camp Voyager novel is a good place to see Borg issues and is a great read all around.

I suppose I shouldn’t let it get to me when strangers several blogs and blogbacks away say they think I’m full of myself. It didn’t occur to me that Victoria would take down that particular blog entry - I’m still not sure she did, since I don’t know much about livejournals. Anyway, feel free to put it back up if you did take it down. The damage was already done, anyway. Next time I just won’t click on the comments link, since I know it won’t be pretty.

I probably shouldn’t have been so blunt in my previous post, either. Again, it was the people at a fourth remove who got insulted, and Victoria, despite, or perhaps because of, her misinterpretation, had some interesting things to say.

For instance, she suggested that people use the muse metaphor out of longstanding habit. I’m sure some people talk about the muse without any real internal referent, just because they hear it bandied about so much. Yet that cannot explain the persistence of the muse in general - no one talks about Apollo, though we still have war. Fanfic writers don’t talk about spleen or bile, though these metaphors lived from ancient Greece well into modern times.

I’m getting too apologetic in my old age. My original purpose for this post was just to link the new muses category. (Categories are just another cool feature brought to you by Moveable Type, like comments that don’t slow the page download to a crawl.) Some older musey musings have been included, which make a start towards the musobiography Lori requested.

[This entry has been edited from the original rant.]

Yes, I’m uninterested in engaging in a discussion with people who seem incapable of separating personal opinion from personal insult, or who have related difficulties distinguishing between what I’ve actually said and what they think I’ve said, or who think I’m capable of hobbling the English language singlehandedly because I prefer strong words to weak ones. I’m willing to do it in zendom (much as it annoys Christine) but not here. See later entries for why. To the end of not discussing, I’ve edited this entry down to a more average episode of Jemima’s Blog.

I blamed Lori, rebel-in-training, for saying that museful writing was better than museless writing. I never said it. (Watch a future muse entry for my opinion on that issue.) She says she never said it that way either, which means the people who read it that way were hallucinating.

More on colloquialisms:

I find them unclear. As a writer, I have to choose between strong words and weak words. Fun and happy are weak words, ones I’d be very cautious of putting into the mouth of a character (only partly because most of my writing is set in the future where current colloquialisms stand out as bad writing) and equally cautious of using in a discussion, where they lead to confusion.

The aside:

I’m not here to encourage good writing. I don’t know where anyone got that idea. This is my blog, and I’m here to express my opinions, and, when the muse strikes, to write fanfic. The rest of you can save fandom from itself - I’ve done my time.

On the sweating and the bleeding:

Note that I have never and will never claim that sweating and bleeding for your writing is worthwhile, sane, productive, or any other such thing. Since I dislike most mainstream literature, my exposure to the hurt me school of writing has been through fanfic, where I’ve seen a fraction of writers boast of having to cut each word out of their flesh, or at least sweat or bleed for their writing. It still surprises me when people say that, and that attitude is as alien to the muse as is writing for fun.

As for what is native to the muse, see the later muse entries.

Space Weather News for May 10, 2002

A PLANETARY REMINDER: As the sky fades to black on Friday evening, May
10th, Venus and Mars will pop out of the twilight a mere one-third of a
degree apart. (The tip of your pinky held at arms length is about twice
that wide.) It’s a rare opportunity to peer through a telescope and see
two planets at once — or simply enjoy them with your unaided eye. Look
toward the west after sunset to find the pair. Visit SpaceWeather.com for
more information and recent images of the ongoing planet show.

Have you heard of remote sensing? I seem to be an expert in remote annoying.
My own personal thoughts on the muse have filtered
down through Lori’s and Victoria’s blogs into the hands of the museless, which means,
at the very least, that I’m going to have to switch the category on the first muse entry to
fanfic [moved again to muses], so the unintended muse war is all in one
place, for fuming reference.

Here I am, not apologizing again. This is my blog and I’m not going to be
diplomatic. If you want diplomacy, Lori’s blog is right there in the link list. I’m not
full of myself; I just happen to have my own opinions. If you don’t like them,
then, as we say in the industry, click off.

Well, that being said, I’ve had an interesting muse-related experience lately.
I used to say I loved all my fic equally, flaws and all. I used to write them, edit
them, then put them down and never look back. It’s not that I wouldn’t edit them
to death, at the time, but I never let them sit for editing reasons. I only put them
aside when the muse flagged (or turned C/7 and refused to finish J/C fic), until
the muse returned.

Recently, however, I reread most of my fic. I still loved them all, and wouldn’t
retouch a word except for misspellings (which I do fix) and repeated uses of the
same word close together (which I don’t bother to fix). There was one exception,
though, Colony, my old novel.
Christine was right about it back when I wrote it,
and if I had the time now, I might do a Lori-scale revision of the thing. It’s so…uneven.
It’s depressing, really - I’m not sure I’d know where to start if I were fixing it.
All I know is that it started dragging in the middle and I gave up reading. If its own
mother can’t read it, it’s got to be pretty bad.