Believe it or not, fic: Beta Energy, a tribute to spelling, Mary Sues, and Voyager betas everywhere.
Thank you, Jade & company!
Otherwise, I’ve been working on my stylesheets, using a test blog on my mac,
but as soon as I’ve got the CSS spruced
up I’ll be back to writing those other fics I’ve been threatening,
along with a Buffy Dead Letter that hit me out of the blue yesterday.
So I’ve decided to handle my desire for infinte colors and designs by making stylesheets, a la the old Mozilla start page. Complete instructions for live stylesheet swapping can be found at
A List Apart. I also
found a cool and geeky blog, Dive into Mark.
It’s late, but I’ve been putting off my list update for too long now. If I don’t
do it this minute, I won’t get to it until Sunday and I’ll have BRAD business to attend to then.
Most of the recent additions have been for Jade, whose new J/C story
Idle Hands Make Opportunity tied for first
place in the Romance category of Mixed Doubles. Jade also has some pencil
drawings of Chakotay and Janeway up, with more coming, pencil
permitting.
I’ve upgraded my blog to MoveableType 2.5 and hope to make some
stylistic changes soon. Coming this weekend is a new story, “Beta Energy,”
written in honor of
Beta
Reader Appreciation Day. My other recent bits of fan writing have been a
parody chapter of Pride and Prejudice and a filk or two, which
can be found in the Ficlets category of the
blog.
The revisions to “Colony” have been preempted by several other fic ideas,
and next month will be further postponed by NaNoWriMo. Breath should not
be held.
Here are some questions that have been circulating around the C/7 list. I thought they’d make a good blog meme.
Firstly, how do you feel about feedback? Do you live for it, ignore
it, think it’s nice but not essential?
I like feedback, but I have to conclude it’s not essential. I keep
website stats, and I’ve found that feedback comes from only a tiny
percentage of readers. So it’s my hits that make me happiest - they’re
the real feedback, IMHO.
If 27 people tell me my story is great, but then it’s
beaten in a contest by a story I consider to be a total piece of
crap, does that mean the feedback has been meaningless?
You have to judge the feedback on its own terms. Is it just a note to
tell you “I read this”? There’s nothing wrong with that - it’s like a
personalized hit tracker - but it’s not very meaningful beyond that. On
the other hand, if the feedback is constructive and helps you out in
your writing, or is exceptional (”this is the best story I ever read!”)
or comes from someone whose opinion you trust, then it can’t be
meaningless.
Contests are the bane of the fan world. They frustrate good writers
when they see certain bad writers win, and they also frustrate those bad
writers who don’t win. I’ve seen a lot of contests where the best story
didn’t win, and that’s especially common in the contests run exclusively
for shipper communities. I don’t mean just J/C ones, either. You
should never let a contest result get you down. Fanfic isn’t any fairer
than real life.
The best contests are those that are run blind (where the voters don’t
know who the authors are until the contest is over) and the ASC awards
(in which all fic posted to the Star Trek newsgroup over the course of
the year is eligible and votes are tallied by lines of feedback). Also,
recommendations pages like The Best of Trek tend to give more reliable
results than the average contest.
How many of you writers *know* when you’ve written something good,
regardless of whether you get feedback on it?
I know, at least, I know if it’s good by my personal standards of good.
I don’t think I have a different standard for my own fic as opposed to
other people’s, or for fanfic vs. professional fiction.
How many of you try to do something different with each story you
write?
I don’t try, per se. I’m not interested in writing different genres,
for example - only PG sci-fi interests me. However, part of what
interests me in a particular plot is finding a new way to, say, get the
entire crew pregnant or to get a certain pairing together.
How many of you have a billion ideas and use only a fraction of them
in your stories?
No, I don’t have many ideas for fanfic. I think I triage them - if they
really interest me, I can’t help but write them. Otherwise, I forget
about them pretty quickly. I do have more ideas than I can ever use for
original fiction.
And how many of you sometimes think readers are a bunch of morons who
wouldn’t know a good story if they fell over it?
I’ve probably written about this somewhere before. I don’t think any
readers are morons, or that their preferences are entirely attributable
to bad taste. Here’s my favorite quote on the matter:
I agree with Mia that certain shippers are looking for Jane Austen in
Space. I can’t say I object to Jane Austen anywhere, at any time, but
I have a beta monkey in the back of my brain that keeps me from enjoying
the worst of the lot. Some people are missing the monkey, but that just
makes them less critical readers, not morons. Really.
In honor of my new version of MoveableType, I though new templates
might be in order. In fact, I thought I might even be wild and crazy
and use web-unsafe colors. I’m a rebel.
Familiar I am, in the web-Jedi way, with the 216 web-safe colors,
meant to guarantee consistency across different monitors, operating
systems, and color depths. I know where to find the websafe colors
listed by value,
am intimately familiar with Visibone’s lovely
my time in their color
lab.
Rumor has it, there are only
truly safe colors. Although three of those colors are my
favorite sunshine-yellow spectrum, I cannot advocate such
extraordinary abstinence in web design.
Yet there comes a time in a webmistress’s life when #ffff00 just
doesn’t cut it anymore. Where does she go for illicit colors, for
the #a4b217 her mother warned her against? After asking a
few unsavory characters, I came across a page devoted to using
palette. Behold the
Mix and match your
poisons. Read a
Watch this space for a whiter shade of pale…
The minute, practically the second, I upgrade MoveableType, they come
out with a new version. Now I have to upgrade to 2.5, since I’m so
on top of things at the moment. Somehow, Bill of mt.el fame found my
post, despite it being only a day old, and freeshell being
down most of today. I haven’t even figured out this thready pinging
stuff yet, so that can’t be what led him here.
Anyway, for Bill’s information, I’m running Emacs for MacOS X, and I
built it from the CVS source just a few posts back. I assume that’s
why it didn’t have any packages installed. I’m not sure they’re all
that happy now that they are installed - emacs froze during my
“whoo-hoo” post last night. The post got through, but emacs never
returned to operation. Perhaps the problem was that I was re-editing
the post I’d just edited. Or perhaps the problem was the general
Carbon emacs problem with spawning subprocesses that I was hoping my
bleeding-edge emacs build would cure, but didn’t. Sigh.
That’s more geekiness than anyone wants to hear. I suppose I should
head over to the freeshell bulletin board and see what the downtime
was all about.
[P.S.] It was just a disk upgrade, and some good news: freeshell
is now tax-exempt.
[P.P.S] I almost forgot the Link of the Day:
into Accessibility, thirty days to HTML Correctness.
While surfing the blogs, I came across a
guy who wrote an Emacs interface for MoveableType. Just the thing for me, I thought; all my geekiness in one convenient elisp package…but it wasn’t exactly a convenient package. First I had to download SOAP for MT, so MT could communicate with metablogging tools. Then I had to download a laundry list of things that mt.el, the emacs mode, required: xml-rpc.el, the url package, the w3 package and the elib package. The author provided the first, but I had to check url and w3 directly out of source, and then it took me a while to figure out that yes, elib hasn’t been revised in seven years. (I was reluctant to download something from 1995.)
Nor was this post posted from emacs. When mt.el was finally working, I got an error back from MoveableType itself, saying it couldn’t find the metaWeblog perl module. I think that means that I can no longer put off upgrading to the latest version of MovableType. Wish me luck…
[P.S.] I upgraded to 2.21, though it looks the same as 2.0. There are new geeky things lurking beneath its placid blue exterior, though.
[P.P.S.] Testing from emacs…1..2..3…
[P.P.P.S.] Whoo-hoo! Now there’s an evening successfully
frittered away.
Things are gearing up for Beta Reader Appreciation Day on October 13th. Have you hugged your beta lately?
A link from Jo: Star Wars Asciimation. I’m not sure why I found it so funny - maybe it was Leia’s ascii hair-buns.
Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers (1758-1840) was not the first person to ask why the
night sky was dark, but he got all the credit and top billing in the paradox. (He
made less philosophical observations of comets and asteroids, too.)
If you’re curious about the solution to Olbers’ paradox - the
answer is not obvious - then check out
curiouser.co.uk, home
of the paradoxical.