Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Scary Boston weather of the day: record low temperatures

I’ve been thinking about the difference between the traditional fanfic solutions to the J/C problem and those applied to Sam/Jack. I wasn’t expecting there to be a difference; in fact, my first Sam/Jack fic corresponds closely in approach to my first J/C fic. My idea for an ice planet fic similarly resembles my second J/C fic. And I’m not the only one giving me VOY flashbacks - SuzVoy gives me the same sense of J/C deja vu.

I was never one for taking the traditional J/C approach in which Janeway suddenly comes to her senses, tosses Starfleet regulations aside, and lives happily ever after with Chakotay. I preferred more exotic solutions to the problem of protocol. I think Suz was willing to toss protocol aside; she’s brought that plot over to Stargate - but in my ickle newbie experience, she’s in the minority. The traditional Sam/Jack approach is rather to have Jack retire from the Air Force (or otherwise slip out of the chain of command) so that Our Couple can fraternize happily ever after.

So my question is, Why? Starting with two ships that share the same basic premise (two officers who can’t be together because of military regulations), how do you get two bodies of fic that are so different, especially considering the influx of J/C fans into Stargate fandom? Why are there so many fics in which Jack retires and Sam takes over the team, but none worth mentioning in which Janeway retires and Chakotay takes over the ship? Why is protocol all in Janeway’s mind, but not all in Jack’s mind?

I know some C/7 fans who would say that this is actually the same approach - J/C fans emasculate Chakotay by making him a lapdog, and Sam/Jack fans emasculate Jack by forcing him into retirement. Jack is getting a much worse deal, though - at least Chakotay gets to keep his job, if not his dignity. Not only is retirement bad for Jack, but don’t you think Sam enjoys saving the world with Jack? Yes, she could command SG-1 herself, but Sam is a Riker - she likes it where she is.

I don’t want to get all feminist-meta on this issue. I’m not asking anyone to password protect their swooning idiot women. At this point I’d love to see Sam give up her career for Jack, just for the change of pace. In fact, within the context of their respective shows, it would be a lot easier for Sam or Chakotay to go civilian yet keep on doing their jobs. So why aren’t there as many Sam resignation fics as there are Jack resignation fics? At least Sam has marketable skills.

All meta aside, it comes down to an issue of writing: why solve the protocol problem the same way every time, when there are so many other approaches that are being neglected? For me, fanfic is about the variety. I like to use technobabble or matchmaking aliens, but you can make your pairing a test case for fraternization as in the Captain and Counselor series, or start a court martial trend to rival the Janeway/Maquis/Equinox Trial tradition of Voyager fandom. The possibilities are endless.

Then again, the problem may be all in my mind. I’m the ickle newbie so I haven’t read that many fics. Resignation may be just a passing fad.

Contest of the day: The Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards

The Awesome Author Awards are happening again. I wrote the KK to say I wasn’t entering because I’ve retired from Trek, but I have a few other reasons for not entering this year. I’m one of a handful of writers (Dakota, KJ, Sängerin, Sheri) who have entered in all three years, and it was my personal (not contest) policy to enter different stories every year. Last year, especially, I figured that I wouldn’t win or place but that the contest would be a way for people to see my new stories, since I don’t participate in mailing lists anymore. This year I have no new J/C stories to enter, so there’s no point to my entering on that account.

One reason so few other J/C writers have entered for three years running is that winners become ineligible. This policy is also used in the ASC Awards for the Alara Rogers (Best Author) award. It’s an approach that can bite you in the behind after a few years - I call it the last one to leave ASC turn out the lights and pick up the Alara Rogers award effect. It’s not so gratifying to win an award once the real competition has become disqualified or left the fandom entirely.

I know there are people who aren’t picky about how they get their awards, but I’m not one of them. I don’t want an award that I’m the last one left in the fandom to pick up - I’d rather just move on to fandoms that are still active enough to generate new competition. Moreover, even eligible authors still active in the fandom are avoiding AAA this year, compounding the last one out effect. I know of several writers who aren’t entering AAA this year because of unrelated incidents within KK (of which I have only second-hand knowledge), and others who won’t enter on suspicion that the contest itself is being rigged or abused in some way.

Personally, I don’t believe that there is any internal corruption of the contest in favor of KK members. In any contest, people will know certain authors and therefore be more familiar with their fic and more likely to vote for it, but this effect reaches beyond KK members. If there’s a big pro-KK slant to the winners, I’ve never noticed it. As for external attempts to cheat in AAA, I have no first-hand knowledge of it but from my perspective, such cheating has no visible effect - if person X places ahead of person Y because X cheated, but I don’t think either of them writes well, then for me the cheating is irrelevant.

To put it more simply, if I don’t like the fic of writer X but she has a hundred friends who love it, and if I don’t like Y either but she has a hundred friends who are willing to stuff the ballot box for her, how can I tell the difference? The friends of X are voting in good faith, and those of Y in bad faith, but if I don’t know either X or Y, to me it looks like two mediocre writers got the same number of votes.

So for me as a fringe member of the fandom, with nineteen days to go to my Trek retirement, the only standard I can apply to a contest is whether the best fic (in my opinion as a reader) wins. Fanfic contests are therefore almost always a disappointment to me, because the stories and writers I think are the best rarely win. That’s setting aside the fact that I don’t win, which is certainly a disincentive to entering contests but is not my complaint. I can always assume that my own fic is not as good as I think it is, but I’m not the only one not winning AAA.

When I vote in a contest, I look at every story in the contest (except NC-17 and slash), or if, like the ASC Awards, the contest is too big for that, I make sure to look at every story in the categories where I’m voting. I say look at rather than read because if a story is downright bad, or clearly worse than other stories I’ve already read in the category, I don’t finish it. As a consequence of this policy, I have looked at every PG story in AAA for the past three years. Because AAA is so huge, I had to keep detailed records of whom I was considering voting for. So I know exactly how far off the results are, in each case, from what I thought they would be.

For comparison, I’ll give the lists of who won in each year, and who I voted for. AAA placements are in order of winner, runner up, and honorable mentions. People equally ranked, in my opinion or as honorable mentions, get slashes between them. My rankings are determined from the number of categories I voted for them in, and ranking if there was ranking involved.

2001 AAA results: Shayenne, EJ, Cassatt/D Kent/KJ
Jemima’s ranking: EJ, Clare009, Shayenne, Lady Firebird, Karma, Alicia/Claudia/D Kent/KJ, Ammo/Sangerin/Turtlewoman

The first year was a big year, so I have a bunch of people in my list who got only a vote or two from me. EJ was far and away the best of the bunch, even better in 2001 than in the next when she won, but Shayenne is a good writer - I can’t complain that she won. I voted for two people off the Honorable Mention list, in only one category each. This was, by comparison, a good year. [I confused Dakota with D Kent at first - sorry about that.]

2002 AAA results: EJ, Brianna, Jemima/KJ/Sheri
Jemima’s ranking: EJ, Seema/Rocky, Monkee, Jade, JinnyW

In 2002, things began to get funky. EJ won, perhaps because she’s the kind of writer that crosses boundaries between what I like and what the general AAA voting population likes. Note, however, that I did not vote even once for any of the other people with Honorable Mentions (including myself). I did consider voting for Brianna in one category, but she didn’t quite make it. Most notably neglected in 2002 was Monkee, considering her fame in J/Cdom and abroad.

2003 AAA results: Brianna, MaquisKat, Kadi/KJ/Sylvia
Jemima’s ranking: Seema/Rocky, JinnyW, Jade/Caffey, Sylvia, Brianna/Diane/Morgan/Yael

This time I did vote for Brianna in one (and only one) category, as my third choice. Even Sylvia did better - she was my first choice in one category. Otherwise, I didn’t vote for the winners at all. The lists are nearly disjoint. I knew Seema and Rocky were doomed after the results of the previous year, but I’d at least hoped for a showing for JinnyW. No such luck.

None of this is intended to get down on Brianna. If you write something and other people enjoy it, that’s great. I don’t like a lot of the stories that make it into SNW, but the ability to sell your work, either literally or in terms of hits and feedback, is what counts. Writing to the market is more important than abstract literary qualities. As the man said,

“The public does not like bad literature. The public likes a certain kind of literature, and likes that kind even when it is bad better than another kind of literature even when it is good. Nor is this unreasonable; for the line between different types of literature is as real as the line between tears and laughter; and to tell people who can only get bad comedy that you have some first-class tragedy is as irrational as to offer a man who is shivering over weak, warm coffee a really superior sort of ice.” –G.K.Chesterton in “Charles Dickens”

So I have to conclude that AAA is not my market. They want coffee and I’m selling ice. All my favorite authors are also selling ice and losing along with me. ASC is my market. I don’t look at the ASC Awards results and think who voted for these people? I know who they were, I know what their feedback said, and I know they’re looking for what I’m looking for in fic.

And in nineteen short days when I retire from Trek, the Stargate SG-1 Fan Awards will be my market. Fortunately they’re by nomination, so there’ll be none of this considering whether or what to enter.

Yes, I am a huge fic snob. I don’t mean to be - there are times when I’d like to know how a story turns out, but for reasons of quality I just have to close the window. For Jerie’s sake (since she can’t figure out what to recommend to me), I’m trying to figure out my exact fic-snob requirements.

The biggest component is raw quality of composition. I wasn’t always a writing snob, but once I started writing myself (three and a half years ago) my pleasure in badfic was ended. Whenever bad writing is getting in my way I close the window - I don’t care how good the concept is. By bad writing I don’t mean bad plot, bad style, or bad characterization - those are all mistakes that can be made in a well-written story. It’s not necessarily the simple technical mistakes, either: if I know how a word should be spelled or where a comma is supposed to go, I can overlook the error. I enjoy the occasional said-bookism and I’m slipping back into third person omniscient in my own writing.

I was looking for a good example of bad writing from The Slash Fiction Hall of Shame (since I figured few to none of my readers read slash in those particular fandoms so no one would be offended) but it turns out that bad writing is more than any particular paragraph I could find to typify it. Bad writing isn’t any specific problem, but the overall result that the reader cannot tell what’s going on in the story. If there’s an AU Sam around and I can’t tell which of the two Sams is talking at any particular point, that’s bad writing. If the team visits a new planet and I get no sense of space or time in their explorations, that’s bad writing. If there are fits, starts, and jumps that lose the reader, that’s bad writing.

The next requirement on my list used to be, and possibly still is, quality of plot. I won’t read a story with good writing but an AWOL or all-angst plot. All-angst plots are the sort that don’t have any external events or action driving the story - characters Have Talks and Meditate Upon Their Pain, but nothing happens. I’m not asking for gen here - I don’t care how much kissyface there is in the story as long as there’s also a story. Here’s a hint - if your characters never fire up the stargate, your story may lack plot.

I’m pretty forgiving of small plot problems, though - for example, there was an unnecessary bit of whipping in Until the End of the World by Ruth M. King, which was part of an evil-general-up-to-something-mysterious plot thread that was overdone and never resolved, but I persevered and enjoyed the story. It wasn’t a groundbreaking work of literature, but the plot kept rolling along steadily with actual external events, so I kept reading. (That’s practically the entirety of the craft, right there.)

In third place but gaining fast is quality of characterization. I don’t mind if the events of the story lead to Wedded Bliss, but at the beginning I need to see everyone acting more or less like themselves. Now back in my Trek days, I didn’t mind bad or superficial characterization because I didn’t have a real feel for the characters as broadcast (with the exceptions of Tom and Seven). I know other people have set ideas about Janeway, especially, but to me most of the crew were kind of hazy to begin with and TPTB didn’t help by neglecting several of them. My Voyager experience could be the adverse effect of having a large ensemble cast (as opposed to 4 major and 2 minor characters in SG), or it could just be that I didn’t get to see the show all that often so I couldn’t tell if the dialogue was off. Nowadays, mischaracterization of the Big Four will turn me off a fic pretty quickly, although the superficial approach may slip past me.

Last on my list is style. Though I like to see different styles, plain, clean prose is so much to ask for that I’m not going to make demands in this area. If the fic experiment is making my head hurt, the window gets closed. On the other hand, if I get some good style for free, I’m willing to overlook flaws of plot - for example, Once in a Lifetime by Michelle V. had such a lovely style that I didn’t realize until the end that I was never going to find out what the plot was. I’ve seen a lot of that sort of figure-out-your-own-ending writing in Fantasy & Science Fiction. It’s surprising to see it in fandom; I know from personal experience how readers will get on your case for sequels if you leave them hanging at the end.

I think my fic standards are reflected in my writing. I try to write well, which is, clearly. I’m torn between creating a nice plot in which (non-canon) things happen and keeping the characters somewhat in character. Style is the least of my concerns and I almost never experiment with it - at least, not successfully. If that makes me a snob, then I’m a snob with a heart of schmoop.

Mars link of the day: Blue sky over Spirit (thanks to mike)

Jerie warned me that season 4 was good, but she didn’t say how good. Although I agree that “Window of Opportunity” is probably the best episode ever, my personal favorite is “Beneath the Surface.” I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic Rasta-tech beefcake episodes, and shippy memory loss is just a big fat bonus.

The muse is having a Stargate attack, which isn’t good. She’s supposed to be revising Colony or writing something saleable; it would be one thing if she were in time for the samandjack fanfiction awards, but she’s not. Now she (technically, he) has a thing for ice planets.

And it’s been forever, but I read a fic: This Cannot Be Happening by…well, I have no idea who it’s by. Stargate writers tend to leave their names off their fic. But whoever that masked writer was, her story placed in some awards that I was skimming for AU fic. It was an enjoyable read despite the idiot plot element that became clear partway through the story - one of those if you’d only told me X, none of this angst would be happening now. But if you ignore the angst, there’s a nice quantum mirror and Sam/Jack friendship story there.

Word count: 4500

I wrote a real, non-drabble, non-crossover Stargate fic. The muse showed up with the idea last night, after I watched 405 “Divide and Conquer” and Jade requested (and I quote) kissyface. I’m more surprised that I wrote 4,500 words in one day - quite a number of which were good technobabble or dialogue - than that the muse can still ship up a storm. It felt like the good old VOY days, when I was vastly productive (if only of schmoop). Kahless knows I couldn’t sit down and write 4,500 words of Trek in one day, not for love or money.

The story will be up after a brief beta.

Meteor shower of the day: The Quadrantids

Since everyone’s doing it…

What was one of the best fandom things that happened to you in 2003?

Stargate! If it weren’t for Jerie getting me addicted to Stargate, I’d be out of fandom completely by now. Instead I have a fun new show with snappy dialogue and real sci in the fi - or at least slightly better technobabble than Trek.

What was one of the worst fandom things that happened to you in 2003?

I’m pretty sure there was more Internet Troll activity, or I wouldn’t have written Goodbye Internet Trolls, but like the man said, For you have the troll always with you; but me you have not always. I think the worst thing was how we last few Trek holdouts seemed to give up on fandom this year. ENT hammered the final nail into the coffin of Trek fandom in 2003.

What fandom thing do you want to accomplish in the coming year?

I want to finish my revision of Colony, and maybe dig a few other bits of fic out of the UFO folder for posting. Mainly, though, I want to retire from Trek.

What fandom thing in 2003 do you feel was your greatest accomplishment?

I wrote a couple of Khan filks that are some of my best to date: I Will Revive and Raj of Rage.

What fandom thing that you did in 2003 do you wish you could erase?

I didn’t do enough fandom stuff to regret any of it.

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about the same?

I wrote many more drabbles than I expected to produce in a lifetime, but otherwise very little fic. I didn’t write that much last year, either, though, so it’s about the same.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2003?

I wrote a drabble in all 5 Trek fandoms, which is 4 more than I ever expected to write in. The Khan obsession also came out of the blue and is all Jerie’s fault.

What’s your favorite story of the year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you happiest.

My favorite story is one I never quite wrote - the true story of Khan. I have bits of it scattered in posted and unposted stories, but the real story is only in my head.

Did you take any writing risks this year? (See above for unexpected pairings, etc.) What did you learn from them?

I don’t believe in “taking risks” or “challenging yourself.” I believe in writing what you want to write when you want to write it. However, most of my perpetual revisions to Colony were made this year for the specific purpose of writing a novel (as opposed to the outline of a novel).

Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the New Year?

My fanfic goals are to finish Colony and retire from Trek. My profic goals are not nearly so specific - I’m not even sure whether I want to finish a novel this year or just stick to short stories. My all-purpose goal is to find the muse and drag her out of whatever seedy bar she’s holed herself up in. At this point I don’t care if she writes profic or Stargate, just as long as she writes something.

The truth is, I’m in this writing thing for the muse high. When she’s not around, it’s way too much work for my naturally lazy disposition.

Holiday of the day: Happy New Year, everyone, and be sure to bum a few free rides on the T after 8pm!

St. Ignatius hasn’t helped me much yet, but after mailing off my latest Writers of the Future entry, I skimmed a new writing book at Brookline Booksmith: The Midnight Disease. Local neurologist Alice Flaherty tries to explain the biological basis of creativity, using insights gained from her own bouts of hypergraphia.

The author uses the association of creativity with epilepsy and manic depression to trace the creative spirit to particular locations in the brain. I skipped the intermediate chapters on writer’s block to get to the elusive muse. While she mentioned Julian Jaynes’ theories as well as the idea that the muse is the unconscious mind, her own position seemed to be that the muse is the unrecognized interior voice, not unlike the one that tells schizophrenics to kill kill kill.

Accepting for the moment that non-muse writing also comes from the writer’s inner monologue, it’s not clear to me how that voice is supposed to become something…alien. So the inner voice explanation has the same problems as the unconscious explanation - why is our unconscious or internal monologue sometimes recognizable as our own, and sometimes alien enough to call it a muse?

The trouble with scientific explanations is that they leave these basic issues unexplained, giving us only tautologies like the survival of the fittest.

Badfic of the day: Bad Coffee by Miss Alena Louis Watts, Warren, Me. (1916)

Unlike Seema, I haven’t heard the dreaded Christmas Shoes carol, nor have I seen the movie. The songs of the season drive Veronica batty, but I don’t mind them. They’re easy enough to tune out after the first thousand renditions of Silent Night.

‘Twas the season to be filky, but now that I’m semi-retired I even ignored a challenge to filk a Stargate Christmas carol. Most of the good carols are already filks of old German drinking songs or of Greensleeves, so why refilk them? A filk is just a song about an unusual topic set to a stolen tune. Though the usual topic is science fiction or fantasy, deities being born under strange circumstances certainly qualifies.

But of course now the party’s over; the filking season will return at its regularly scheduled time next Thanksgiving. Until then, you might want to tune in to Filk Radio.

Writing link of the day: Tell ‘em You’re A Writer!
Trek obituary of the day: the actress who played Marla McGivers in “Space Seed”

I wasn’t going to mention this, but I was a semifinalist in the Writers of the Future this year. I get a nice certificate (it’s in the mail) and also a critique of my entry. The critique said my main character just observed everything and didn’t have much of a stake in the outcome - though the science was good. I just have to abuse the main character more next time.

The reason I mention it is that I’m taking it as a sign I should stop futzing around with fanfic and get serious about my writing. Like the man says, No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other. Thus, I’m retiring from writing Trek. I won’t take down the site, stop working on FicML, or otherwise flake out on my few fandom commitments. I can understand people thinking that I would, but I’ve never been the social butterfly fandom type so I don’t think a complete flounce is called for. But no new fic for you!

The truth is, my fanfic output started declining when I first started writing original fiction back in 2001. The end of Voyager and the failure of Enterprise to impress were only contributing factors. Stargate is fair game since it’s still on the air and it rarely takes up more than 100 words of my time, but I don’t expect to ever get back to the fic output I had when it was just me and VOY.

And I don’t want to. Fanfic hasn’t been the same fun since I started serving the other master. There’s always that feeling that I’m wasting time and ideas that would be better spent on my own universe. There’s a fic-stopping perfectionism that I didn’t have back in my J/C fluff days. And finally, there’s the fact that writing is no longer just a hobby. I don’t want to work at writing and then turn around and play at fanfic - that’s just too much typing. I want a hobby that’s just a hobby, like needlework, so I can rest my weary muse.

Klingon of the day: Omar

Seema and I have been discussing retirement from writing Trek for a while now. Last night we made a joint resolution to retire on January 1st. I know she’ll never keep it, but let me be the first one to back out - I’m too busy at the moment to retire on the 1st. Retirement involves wrapping up or tossing out a bunch of ufo’s (unfinished objects), most notably Colony, so I’m going to have to retire sometime between mid-January and mid-February.

In fact, I’m too busy to blog why I’m retiring or to chat. I’ll try to explain tomorrow.