Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

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.

Congratulations to all the secret agents, and good luck with those acceptance speeches. As promised, I’ve added the 2001 ASC results to my Voyager links page. In a flurry of markup activity, I also added the appropriate graphics to B’Elanna’s Award Shelf. (Click to see what B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse won, if you really want to know.) It took me a while, mostly trying to convince the paragraphs to clear: left and updating the story index as well.

I fondly remember the days when I would have free time left in the day after a site update for, say, writing fic. Speaking of which, Jade has entered Carpet of Blossoms in the Ripples in the Pond AU contest. There’s an interesting discussion of AU vs. canon writers going on in zendom, which will eventually turn into an Easter Egg Vinegar column. Don’t touch that dial!

On the Buffy side (spoiler alert! run away! run away!), Dr. Deb and I were cheering Anyanka on yesterday as she tried to get her well-deserved revenge upon Xander, World’s Wussiest Wuss. The magic wasn’t going too well, so she ended up doing it the old-fashioned way. You go, demon girl!

On the Mac side, I installed fink today, so I could get some utilities I needed for work. (Fink is Mac is Unix on speed.) The instructions were a little terse, but once I slowed down and read the help screens, it was like magic. I’ve spent literally hours of my life trying to install XFree86 on Linux machines, and fink just did it by itself while I had my back turned. XDarwin is cool, very, very cool.

Let’s see, are there any categories I missed?

Seema went unrecognized in AAA, but she’s been voted Best Author by ASC. She also raked in the story awards, especially in VOY. Penny came in second, and Monkee third.

My holiday story won second place in its diminutive category, and I got a couple of other awards, too. When I get home I’ll put up the 2001 results on my Trek links page, with the ones I keep there from the last few years.

Right now I’m installing more mac stuff for work, so I’ll just leave you with a philosophical question: If a fan snarks in the blogs and nobody notices, was it really mean-spirited?

Strange New Fanfic

It seems like I’ve been voting for the whole month of April. On the one hand, the big contests have been a good chance to catch up on the VOY fic I’ve been ignoring since the series ended a year ago. On the other hand, it’s been a lot of slogging through categories full of uninspiring fic, only to discover that the writers I’ve always thought were very good are still getting all my votes, and the writers I used to think were at least good for a few kilobytes’ amusement just don’t do it for me anymore.

I don’t blame them. The more I write, the more I beta as I read and little sins of characterization and style I once overlooked have become showstoppers for me. I rarely finish a fic for the plot the way I used to, if the writing doesn’t hold up.

I ought to be sorry for my loss. It’s not just fanfic, either - I’m finding it hard to dig up good scifi these days, and I used to read anything I could get my hands on. I was in a used bookstore last week (Avenue Victor Hugo on Newbury Street, if any locals are looking for used sci-fi - there’s more there than at Pandemonium in Cambridge) and didn’t find much that appealed to me. On a whim, I picked up Strange New Worlds IV - I don’t buy pay-per-fic, but in this case it was used so Paramount hasn’t made any money off me. (Sorry about the royalties, Penny. Tell me how much you would have gotten and I’ll mail it to you.) I was hoping it would shake me out of my fanfic doldrums.

At least the stuff was well-written, with a few minor exceptions. There was only one story in there that made me glad I’d bought the book - it was Personal Log by Kevin Killiany, a story about the EMH. Of course, Penny’s story was excellent, but I can have more and better Penny at the click of a link. I would give the awards out differently, too. Sticking to the pattern of at most one per series:

1. Personal Log (VOY)
2. A Little More Action (TOS)
3. The Promise (TNG)

None of my pics actually won a prize, and I didn’t care for the stories that did win, especially the first place winner. The VOY prize recipient was one of the few crew stories in the book, and it wasn’t bad, though rather rushed and disjointed. I’m still not sure what happened - it was very much like an episode in its technobabble, plot holes, and brief, pat dialogue at the end.

What struck me most about the book, and therefore, I suppose, the contest, was the topics of the stories. They were mostly character vignettes, and they leaned heavily toward very minor characters, skirting, and often breaking, the contest rule that stories should be about main or familiar characters. Just to drive home the point, I’ll make a character code list of the main characters in SNW4:

TOS: an OC from the gangster planet with some Kirk, Spock and McCoy; David Marcus; tribbles and crew; a Horta; the Enterprise herself; Kirk; Scotty; McCoy

TNG: an old robot with some Picard and company; Kamin (Picard’s persona from “Inner Light”); Ro Laren; Ian Andrew Troi; Lt. Hawk (don’t ask me who that is)

DS9: Captain Proton; an OC doctor from the 1950’s (this story won, probably for its PC content)

VOY: A Borg Queen and Q (this was a TNG story); Gretchen Janeway (was she ever on VOY, or is she just a Jeri Taylorism?); Trevis (of Trevis and Flotter fame); Paris and Kim; the EMH; the crew; the crew

The structure of the stories was also weighed towards the unusual, with a third of the stories written in the first person, one with a tense shift, one in Borgvision, one in the POV of a heretofore inanimate object, one too terse to make sense, two written as journals, and even a Captain Proton script. I get the feeling the editors are as jaded by Trek stories as I am, and are going for the exotic like some third-year fanfic writer getting into slash.

I take this as evidence that SNW isn’t about fan fiction. No one would sit through these many OC’s passed off as non-MIS stories in a fanfiction forum. What it is, is more pay-per-fic - stories without any meaningful personal interaction between the main characters (with the notable exception of the Paris and Kim story), which branch off into OC’s because that’s the only way to slip a real story with real character development past Paramount.

I’m still avoiding my mailbox. I finished voting in ASC, really, finally, this time. Although I can look through a story category and read everything that’s relatively good (and reread the ones that were really good), I find it much harder to face the author categories. I just don’t know enough about most authors to make a generalization about their work, and I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already said about individual stories.

The only thing I’ve gotten out of the author categories is the idea that I ought to be reading James Winter. I tried Barbara Watson, and I didn’t get far, unfortunately. I trust the people who’ve raved about her, but…it’s all comes down to time.

First sentence rule, people - the first sentence has to tell the reader where you’re going, and that they want to go there with you. Or the first paragraph, at least, and if you can’t do that, then the summary better promise a lot of Borg. Fandom is just like the editor’s desk that way - you have a very limited time to grab me, and them I’m on to the next NEW VOY.

Meg sucked me into her Borgstory - I never got the chance to say, “I don’t have time for this.” Barbara gave me that chance. I have my own fic to write, so I’m going to leap at any excuse to bail out of a story.

Speaking of bailing out, do I face the flooded inbox, or do I go back to voting in AAA? Only ten voting days left…

It’s past my bedtime, so I won’t be able to generate any original content for you. I can, however, quote myself. Here’s a tangent I took in Zendom tonight, when Seema said VOY was easier to write because of the plot-hole spackling opportunities:

The blog war series continues in The Blogger Strikes Back. Lori made my poolboy disappear, which was quite unfair, but she made up for it by straying into yet another fandom. Elsewhere (in the Lori Fan Club, if you must know) Lori links AAA is happening again this year. Though it’s been half a year since I produced any significant J/C, for a lark I looked through my VOY fic to see if I had enough “new” stories to enter. I entered ten last year, out of eleven categories, and I found seven fresh ones already for this year’s mercifully curtailed contest. Nor does that fill the count of my J/C fics. Kahless, but B’Elanna the Canon-Correcting Muse was productive in her day. Buffybot has nothing on her…yet.

So am I going to do it? Do I need one last bad contest experience for old times’ sake? I’m not reading all the (non-smut) entries this time, that’s for sure. Pardon me while I reminisce - AAA is bringing back all sorts of memories of a year ago, when fandom was new (to me) - before C/7, before VOY went off the air, before virtual seasons and bitterness and the mass-unsubscribes as people abandoned VOY for greener pastures.

Ahem. Anyway, I had a few J/C stories tied up in other contests at the time the first AAA was going on, and I wrote a few more, in those last months after AAA and before BOFQ. Although repeat entries are allowed, just for the principle of the thing, I’m not going to repeat any of last year’s entries. Here are my losing fics, both past and planned:

It’s a tighter bunch, anyway, except for The Museum, weighing in at 225k. Since it ate half my year, it deserves to be in there. I may want to switch Thrive with A Light Beyond - what kind of catgory is Friendship/Hurt/Comfort, anyway?

Sorry for the lack of links. The stories are all available on my Voyager fic page.

Take the What Should Your New Year’s Resolution Be? Quiz

This is the week I give up on Enterprise. I loved Porthos, Reed and Phlox, but my now unemployed beta reader Jade put it best when she said, “I like a few of the characters but I feel like I am listening to a song played at the wrong tempo.” (She also said it was like soda without the fizz.) Too, too true. Life is too short to sleep through another Evil Twins™ time travel episode.

So it’s all Buffy, all the time for me, with a little Special Unit 2 on the side. I feel like I ought to be sad.

The zendom page is more informative now, with cool graphics. Thanks, Liz!

Here’s my review, with her permission, of Liz’s review of “Strange New World”:

One thing I forgot to mention in my defense of sarcasm is the moral obligation to mock wickedness. All the more so if it’s petty squabbling BOFQ wickedness…

Part of my research for the Seven Saga is a timeline of Seven’s life, especially the major nits. It’s housed at Wikifection, the C/7 wiki, so if you’re a nitpicker, you can add nits yourself.