Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Liz tells me I should stop if it isn’t fun anymore. There are so many little assumptions hidden in her brief advice that I’m not sure where to begin.

For one thing, I was never in it for the fun, except on the reading side. I don’t read as much now partly because I don’t have time, and partly because I don’t enjoy the sorts of stories I used to, not the way I used to. But Liz was blogbacking my muse psychoanalysis, and the muse was never in it for the fun. The muse does not have such motives; it’s not clear the muse has motives at all.

She came to me and started writing, and while I was Insufficiently Reluctant, I was not having fun per se revising MII or Colony or The Museum until I knew every line by heart, no. I don’t even know what fun means in that context. I did it because the story was inside of me and wanted to come out, and the joy of making a story is not the same as the fun of chatting in #jetc.

If anyone out there is sacrificing the pain of hours writing fic for the fun of feedback or the glory of BNF, I feel sorry for them. They know not the muse. I never understand when someone undermines a story to push it to a particular audience, nor when someone rehashes old fic as part of the hamster wheel potlatch, because I fear and respect the muse more than that.

I’m not picking on Liz. I’m sure I’m confusing everyone with my muse psychoanalysis, because nobody believes in the muse herself. I do. For one thing, I’m willing to take the word of the many, many fanfic writers who’ve talked about their muses. Were they making analogies? Why would everyone make the same analogy?

If you want to know what the muse really is, read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. I’d summarize it myself, but it’s late and I still haven’t gotten around to today’s observations on the muse. Check out this summary; I skimmed it and it looks pretty good.

So, today on the muse: this morning on the T, I was wondering why the muse finds fanfic so much easier to write than original fic. I think it is the characters, after all. The characters are so familiar that all you have to do is toss them into, say, the Mirror-Mirror Universe, and you know, in that mysterious way the muse knows things, what they’re going to do. Presto! Story.

With original fic, a whole lot of which my muse has started and left lying around in various states of unpolish, there are too many vectors. What happens? Who does it happen to? What’s this person like? What will she do? There are too many angles for the muse to collate at once, I think. It must be much easier for LMB to write another Miles novel than to start a fresh fantasy. She starts with the character and fills in fresh ideas every time. Asimov, on the other hand, started with the Foundation idea and filled in fresh (let’s assume so for the sake of argument) characters every time. I think it’s easier, and works out better, to start with the characters. Maybe that’s why when fanfic is good, it is very very good.

Fandom hasn’t been all fun and games, awards and challenges and Sections 31, you know. Think of all the people who toss you off lists and drive you out of genres, all the people who suck you dry then tell you to go take a long walk off a short bridge, all the people who rub you the wrong way then push you over the edge - all the infinite stupidity of fandom.

I’ve appreciated all the idiocy; I’ve appreciated it very much. Why? Because on my own, I’m far too loyal a person. I don’t quit jobs. I don’t drop out of school. I don’t leave lists. So it’s a great service when someone will throw me off a list and save me no end of reading, betaing and writing. It’s a great service when people drift out of a fandom and leave me behind twiddling my thumbs - when they stop tempting me to blow up the ship or assimilate the quadrant one more time. It’s a great service when they make a new fandom so huge and unnavigable that I give up on it in despair. It’s even a fine service when they write badfic, keeping me from reading because the stories I don’t care for so far outweigh the ones I do that there’s too little hope of striking gold.

All of these are ways to gain free time. Any old reason to put down a fic is a good reason, whether that it’s misspelled, or smutty, or angst-ridden, or stereotypical, or incomplete, or part of a huge arc I don’t have time to follow.

Am I a pessimist, because I see all this bad in fandom, or am I an optimist because I turn it all to my benefit? I don’t know - I’m more curious about what it says about my muse than what it says about me.

You see, it struck me that my muse is just another one of these time-saving external factors. In and of myself, I was too loyal to J/C, but the muse was bored out of her ridged skull and she started writing C/7 instead. I was never the type for murder and mayhem, but she borrowed Liz’s black leather and took out Janeway herself, several times over. I could never move on from VOY to another show, but she hopped right over to Tuesday nights and started writing Buffy. I could never walk away from fandom in general, but what has she written for me lately?

I want to stay in fandom, I want to finish the Seven Saga and the Chip Fic, I want the feedback and the derivative nature and the in-jokes; I want it all. She’s not interested. Maybe she’s just tired, maybe she’s been burned, or maybe she feels she’s been there and done that and has the ASC awards to prove it.

I don’t understand her. I’ve never understood the sort of person who’s capable of cutting her losses - I’m there in the brass band going down with the Titanic. She’s out at sea, tossing women and children out of her lifeboat so there’ll be more fresh water for her. She’s a menace, she is, and I don’t even know what she wants.

With my luck, she’ll spend the rest of my life filking tacky seventies songs.

Persistency of Poetry
Matthew Arnold, 1867

Though the Muse be gone away,
Though she move not earth today,
Souls, erewhile who caught her word,
Ah! still harp on what they heard.

Someone inscribed that to me once, when we were young and we wrote other people’s words, sang other people’s songs, believed other people’s beliefs. It seems a long, long time ago, but I’m in the mood for saudades tonight - that doesn’t translate, so let us say, I’m in a melancholy mood.

I’m not sure why. It could still be the let-down after ASC and AAA voting, or it could be the fandom-goes-on feeling I get when people close down glass onion and unsubscribe from zendom and wander off into fandoms where I cannot follow, or it could just be some existential fallout from reading The Curse of Chalion.

Everyone burns out eventually (except possibly Seema). Fandom is a revolving door through which pass many self-proclaimed whores. Maybe we’re fated to be this way, because of the fundamental illegitimacy of fan writing in the eyes of the world. Real writers don’t burn out after a fanonical three years; they’re barely getting started. There are what, fourteen books listed in the front of Curse of Chalion? And LMB was just a housewife with a hobby when she started.

Maybe the problem is that we can never turn this hobby of ours into a cottage-industry. Not only will we never get paid, we’ll never get respect. I showed my lovely sister Veronica some feedback I got in the ASC awards, but she didn’t seem to understand. Look, I’ve done something! The muse was with me, and I touched the sky.

Ok, I’ve done other things, and I have the sheepskins to prove it, but education is a terribly narrow, specialized thing these days - one people don’t understand, but they respect you for it anyway. They don’t respect you for fanfiction, no matter how big your big name. No one will ever know.

Maybe I’m sad because I’m more likely to be published in the Journal of Symbolic Logic than in Analog. You’ll have to take my word for it that I’m not full of myself or obsessed with awards; I’m just a spectator here, the alien/Borg/INTP come down to observe and meta-comment. I understand that people look to fandom for fun - I certainly had nothing else in mind two years ago, reading through the J/C Index during a slow week at work. I had no ambitions of becoming a BNF when the muse came to me and forced me to write Marriage is Irrelevant, and I still don’t.

I want to be a Real Writer, but I know that real sci-fi writers get about as much respect as fanfic writers do. I could grow up to be LMB and people still wouldn’t know my name; they don’t know hers. The race, as the man said, is not to the swift. The Pulitzer is not to the strong. Lori calls it a game, one Yvonne is also tired of, one that burns out its writers almost as efficiently as fandom does - almost. And yet, and yet, there is something more solid about print, something slow and considered and restful, something more serious and less esoteric than the FFF’s of fandom.

I started out in a jetc list that hid the big bad world of fandom from the happy fish of snack-fic, but eventually I found my way around. I met some cool people, and before I knew it, I’d met all the cool people (not to mention the not-so-cool people). And that was it, that was the whole shebang. Some people keep on looking for more shebang, though - either in new shows, or in slash, or in carrying the torch virtually, or in little clubs that exist solely to show the world that so-and-so is cooler than the average fan.

Maybe it’s the final evidence that fanfic is not an art: we end up looking for more and not finding it, and leaving. Oh, we talk about getting better, about improving our writing, but in practice, we wander off to other fandoms, exotica or erotica. Fandom is social, but writing is individual - maybe that conflict is what tears us apart from our muses and our shows and one another.

So they can call me Queen of the Filk (Penny) or Jemima Austen (Lori) or Our Lady of the AU (Liz), but my show is over and gone, and with it went B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse. In the blizzard of blogs and lists flying apart and virtual seasons and revolving-door newsgroups, she caught her death of cold. Here I am, for reasons I hardly understand, wondering if I should just let her rest in peace.

Fandom is us, tooting our own horns, paying our own fic taxes, reading our own fic. We cannot go up and in here, we can only fly round and round, because we are the whole shebang. Why isn’t that enough?

New fic: 148 - all Spike, all the time, and one long spoiler for “After Life”. It’s short, written by the muse (you can tell by the first-person POV - I know better than to write in first-person), and then rewritten by her when Jintian, in her oh-so-politic way, pointed out that the muse had made half the stuff up. Somehow that was never an issue with Voyager…

It’s late, I’m still editing those Buffy fics, but I had some thoughts that must get blogged:

One, I’ve tracked down my muse. Not to get her to write on command, but I’ve figured out what she writes, and what I write. It’s not as simple as saying she writes the good stuff and I crank out the puff pieces, though that would be close. The muse writes the first-person stories (”The Dance”, “Ambassador”, “148″), the mythic short-stories embedded in other fics (”A Maquis Holiday”, “Marriage is Irrelevant”), and, of course, the vastly underappreciated filks (”The Wreck of the Voyager”, “Chakotay”, “Yesterday, When I was Borg”). Sorry I didn’t link all those - they’re all on the Voyager page, except “148″ which is BtVS to appear.

My other thought of the night comes from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, the movie. That was a cheeseball bit of writing on Joss Whedon’s part, and I think it’s what makes him a fanfic writer. We all write fanfic because we take the show too seriously (I have a whole theory of Taking Things Too Seriously, which is going to have to wait for my next turn at bat on Zendom), and The Great Bird of the Hellmouth seems to have taken his Vampire/Teen B-movie too seriously in exactly the same way.

And he keeps on doing it… I know I should be working on that novel, but I Keep On Doing It Too, in scary capital letters. I Can’t Help It. Somebody Stop Me…

Peeve of the Day: fanfic writers who choose their plots specifically to irritate readers into sending feedback. I don’t appreciate being manipulated. If you’d just write a good story, people would send feedback… Well, ok, they don’t, so maybe this sort of behavior is justified. But it’s still an offense against the muse.

I’m still midnight blogging. Pay no attention to blogger - I’m on my free hour of daylight-unsavings time. I was finally admitted to the playground at EnterpriseAndBeyond. I’m still afraid of getting involved in ENT, but I wanted to see the inspiration behind the bitter maggot blog. It took a bit of hunting in the archives–for some reason no one used the subject line bitter maggot–but I think I found the core of the issue.

No, I’m not going to rehash it. There are so many problems with fandom that the particulars don’t really matter anymore. Just as it doesn’t matter exactly why, when I take out DQ Babes in the Mirror-Mirror Universe and think of all the ways I could improve the story, I don’t fix it. Or rather, I don’t take it out in the first place.

If fanfic is a hobby, it should be more fun and less power-trips and clique-blowouts. If it’s a calling, then it should be more respectable, instead of a matter for jokes like that Back To The Future fanfic link someone posted to ASC. If it’s work, then I ought to own what I write, instead of living in Paramount’s legal penumbra. If fanfic writers are better than pay-per-fic hacks, why do people go on reading pay-per-fic instead?

I repeat, this is not a bitter maggot post. I’m just thinking aloud, trying to understand why I hardly write fanfic anymore, and trying to have something to say to Michael when I tell him I can’t write for his project. The reason, I think, is that it is his. I cannot share B’Elanna the Muse, not with him, not with jetcers, not with virtual seasons–not even with the Great Bird of the Galaxy, sometimes.

B’Elanna has always gotten me into trouble, for not writing kissyface, for writing canon instead of J/C, for writing Trek instead of the X-Files. I have to conclude that the people who complain about B’Elanna don’t have the muse. Anyone who asks why you can’t just fix it or toss something out of character into your story because it fits their arc knows not the muse. It’s one thing to be a hack if it means putting food on the table, but to be a hack for no reason, just to satisfy a clique of virtual people, is a betrayal of the muse.

It’s never wise to betray a god, not even an illusory one.