Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Related fic: Than Fade Away (post-VOY)

Just recently I read about SatireWire shutting down, though it happened half a year ago. After citing creative differences, the sole satirist went on to blame burnout, if not in so many words. Today I was looking through Daypop and found a blog entry that related the SatireWire grand exit to the perils of doing what you love for a living.

Burnout is a danger to fan writers, too. The legal tender of fandom is fame and feedback, and fans may end up writing long after the muse has gone because they can’t give up the steady paycheck. I’m not addicted to feedback (or I’d have died of the DT’s long ago), but I’m sentimental about the good old days when the muse was writing 200k epics. I keep hanging around, hoping that the glory days of 2001 will return, or writing the esoteric pairings or Borg-victory plots which still interest me.

I don’t mean the burnout caused by fandom wankery, though I’ve seen my share of that. I used to think I was protecting my fan self from RL by hiding my identity, but I realized a while back that fans are much more of a danger to my RL self than RL people are to my hobby. This horror story of late-night harassment is a prime specimen of the viciousness of fandom, but that’s not my topic.

Whether you’re a fan writer, a professional author, a humorist, or even a blogger, burnout is always a risk. The advantage of getting paid for your hobby is that then you get to do it at least 40 hours a week. Those 40 hours are a dead loss if you’re working some non-beloved job in order to make ends meet and support your avocation. I’d gladly risk burnout for those 40 hours, not to mention the fifteen I spend commuting.

I don’t think you can save your love from burnout just by saving it from the nine-to-five hamster wheel. All those BOFQ’s and burned-out fan writers demostrate otherwise. Deadlines or financial stress or fan harassment can wear you out. Maybe you’ll be too lazy to do what you love. Ayn Rand said it was the hardest thing to do what you really want. She would have been livid at anyone who suggested chasing your dreams was a ruinous and destructive way to think.

But then again, Ayn Rand was an INTJ. If you’re the kind of person who chases your dreams, you’re probably the kind of person who catches them.

Cool mac link of the day: Perversion Tracker reviews the really bad Mac software that never sees the light of day on VersionTracker.

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to writing…the email appears in your box. You thought everyone had forgotten the 50,000 words of dreck you wrote in November, didn’t you? The lazy days, the desperate weekend catch-up sessions, the wretched last 2,000 words you wrote on the night of the 30th when you discovered that your word counter and NaNoWriMo’s didn’t agree…yes, they’ve all come back to haunt you. It’s time for NaNoEdMo - it’s time to edit that albatross into a sleek, fashionable penguin (paying special attention to the repulsive imagery of chapter four).

Don’t think you’ll get away just because didn’t finish your NaNoNovel, or even worse, didn’t start. According to the EdMo FAQ, any pre-existing draft of a novel qualifies for a national edit. Even fan-fiction is allowed. All you need is 50,000 words of dreck, more or less, and 50 hours of your time in March. Start planning now with the Pre-EdMo Tips. Check out Holly Lisle’s article on one-pass manuscript revision to make your first NaNoEdMo your last.

This comes at a bad time for me. After the exhaustion of NaNoWriMo, I took December off, then did some last-minute Trek writing in January for the ASC Awards year deadline. This month I’ve been on vacation from fanfic, slowly working myself up for more original fic. I have a stack of books on metallurgy I’ve been reading for one short story (which was supposed to be about genetics, not alloys) - I was so into The Nature of Metals by Bruce A. Rogers (1964) that I almost missed my T stop tonight. I certainly don’t want to stop writing both that story and the other I started this month in order to go back and edit dreck, but I’ll never get anywhere by starting novels. At some point, you have to finish them.

There goes another month…

I’ve been going on in my own comments (shame on me) about what constitutes a religious theme in literature. It’s not an idle question for me; the original novel (the Right Novel, to which the Wrong Novel, the Wrong Prequel, and the NaNoWriMo novel are prequels) was meant to be a fictionalization of a certain historical religious persecution. If I ever get anywhere with it, I would judge my success by whether I’d made it peculiar to those events, specificially the religious and philosophical tenets that led to them. I’m not expecting to have any difficulty writing about persecution per se, but making my theme more than a random religious persecution is much more of a challenge.

It’s easy to write, say, Baha’i fiction about today’s Baha’i, because you can say, look, Baha’i. When, instead, you’re writing about an obscure religion ten thousand years in the future, in its struggles against some other equally fictionalized oppressive regime, how do you know they’re Baha’i without either some link to the Baha’i of the past or some uniquely Baha’i moral quandary for them to face? I still don’t know what that pivotal point is, so the novel has gone nowhere fast.

Likewise, in a world where I see only hobbits and dwarves, elves and pre-Christian men, how do I know the theme is a Christian one? Where is the connection to something uniquely Christian? I don’t see it. I judge The Lord of the Rings by the standards I apply to The Right Novel to tell whether I’ve succeeded in writing from the standpoint of a particular religion - is there something there that conveys the spirit of the faith?

It’s not enough for The Right Novel to be moral - I hope all my novels, whether or not they get finished, will be moral. Writing isn’t interesting without some sort of moral dilemma. I hope they’ll convey my morality, and that only the bad guys will endorse moral values of which I disapprove, but I know my morality agrees with everyone else’s on most points - mercy, honor, self-sacrifice, what have you. Those things are a given, and I hope they’re in my fanfic, too. They’re the basic level that I see in The Lord of the Rings, and that’s obviously enough for a great story.

When I look for models for the Right Novel, however, I look for stories that convey ideas with which the reader might disagree. That’s something I find, not in Tolkien, but in Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis. Not many writers take this approach, and fewer succeed as consistently as an Ayn Rand - some pass off bald statements as theme, like Greg Egan mocking Christians on a bad day, or in the tedious and badly written didactic stories RJ mentioned. That’s not literature, though, that’s assertion.

Considering my lack of progress with the Right Novel, I wonder how often I would write that sort of story of ideas. When I look over my fanfic, I don’t find much in the way of controversial morality - there’s my Ayn Rand pastiche with its debate over the morality of genocide, and a short, obscure story about virtue as its own punishment and another, similar story about breaking the rules. Then there’s a smattering of pro-Borg sentiment, especially in this filk, and a story about mirror-mirror morality. None of the ideas are truly integrated into a story the way I’d want the Right Novel to be.

I’m losing my train of thought, so I’ll stop here. Pardon any incoherence.

Cool blackwork pattern of the day: Pomegranates from Elizabethan Blackwork

Cool quote of the day: Writers will write because they canít not write (dive into mark). Or in other words, Writers are the people who can’t not write. I suppose that means bloggers are the people who can’t not blog.

Another good link from dive into mark defines Logical Rudeness. I wish I had the time to read it all, but I have a thousand words to write still, and I can’t not write them.

The following is a list of what I’ve written in the past year, a la Alara Rogers. All stories are VOY unless otherwise indicated.

• Jade’s Drabble, a J/C drabble for my beta reader (January)
• Janeway:
  The Musical! (Filk of La Mancha), a filk of the musical “Man of La
  Mancha” (February)
• Vote for the
  Roses, a filk of “Run for the Roses”, in honor of the Awesome Author Awards (March)
• The
  Simple Joys of Captaincy, a filk of “The Simple Joys of
  Maidenhood” from Camelot (April)
• Buffy Anne, Supergirl a filk of the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” based on the episode “Normal Again” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, April)
• It’s My Blog, a filk of “It’s My Turn” (metafilk, May)
• Filk, Filk a Filk, a filk of Sing, Sing a Song (metafilk, June)
• Than Fade Away, an exercise in cookie-baking and implausible pairings (July)
• I’ve
  Grown Accustomed to the Phage, a filk of “I’ve Grown Accustomed to
  Her Face” (August)
• Portions of the unpublished filk musical, “The Sound of Borgness”, including the excerpt (How Do You Solve a Problem Like) Drone Seven (August)
• Unpublished revisions to Colony (August/September)
• Pabulum and Protocol, a short Jane Austen parody (September)
• Season, a filk of “Memory” from Cats (metafilk, September)
• Unpublished portions of the Seven Saga (September)
• Beta
  Energy, a short humor piece for Beta Reader Appreciation Day (October)
• 50,000 words for National Novel Writing Month (original fiction, November)
• The Sound
  of Sickbay, a filk of “The Sound of Silence” (December)
• Every Word
  I Said, a short episode addition to “Endgame” written to complete the ChetSev Series (December)
• “Typhoid Neelix,” an unfinished J/P fic (December)
• “The Borg Queen,” an unpublished filk of “The Boxer” (December)

I’ve worked on bits and pieces of other unfinished fics, including three Buffy stories which I may never complete (”A Soul by Any Other Name,” “How Lame is That?” and “Secrets”), two other original novels, and five original short stories.

Now that I’ve typed it all up, it’s much more than I remembered writing. I’d forgotten the two filk musicals, in particular. It was a very good year for filk, if that’s not an oxymoron. This was an encouraging meme - I highly recommend it to everyone who thinks they’re burned out.

The Die J/C Die contest is now open for voting. (Some characters did die, but not J or C.) There are two categories with 16+ entries each. Seema and I are both entered, so there’s plenty of C/7 for all.

Speaking of contests, I’m currently wondering whether I want to enter the Writers of the Future contest, one of the biggest contest/anthologies in the sci-fi genre. I meant to enter for the last deadline but was too busy. The next deadline is coming up, but this time I’m more concerned than before about the contest being run by the Church of Scientology. Yes, their money is as green as anyone else’s, but at what cost in human potential was it tithed?

Compared to WotF, SNW is a moral cakewalk. Fanfic should, in principle, be free, but if I were hard up for money or publicity, I could stomach entering the contest and risk becoming a cog in Paramount’s large pay-per-fic machine. Analogously, I’d rather write open-source software but if I needed a paycheck I’d write it for money.

I’m not sure I’d take a job with the Church of Scientology, however.

Word count: 52,000

Well, it’s over. I lost a lot of sleep, and I wrote a lot of garbage. I had to write 2,500 words today because of a major disagreement between my word count algorithm and the official one. The extra 2,000 were the hardest words of all - I was all set to goof off and play with Java, catch up on my blogging, and generally have a life again, and instead I had to go back and crank out more intermediate scene material.

It’s a very rough draft. The word count is, technically, enough for a novel but it’s too low to get published. It’s not an issue of insufficient plot - my work of NaNo is more outline than novel. There’s still almost no description in there. It could practically be a screenplay, there’s so much dialogue and so little of anything else, but that’s a good for a draft since the plot is all down on virtual paper.

I have one POV character, so I thought early on that I should switch to first person. I didn’t at the time because of the extra work and the tight timeframe. That gives me a direction to go in for the first revision.

But first, fanfic!

Word count: 49,475

I can’t believe I wrote so many bad words today. I’ll have to finish tomorrow, though. One can excuse only so much continuous anti-social NaNoing over one holiday weekend.

Word count: 30,000 (three-fifths done)

Last night when I was hard up for subplots, Dr. Deb suggested the Seven Deadly Sins. They are: vanity, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, avarice, and sloth. I got a subplot immediately out of envy, or possibly jealousy. I’ve already used gluttony for the main plot. I don’t really know what people mean by pride, and when you call it vanity instead it seems more sinful, but less deadly.

The sin that afflicts my characters most seriously is the author’s sloth. The poor things don’t even have hair colors yet. It’s very unwise to get behind, and here I am, 2,000 words behind going on 4,000 in about ten minutes. Yet I’m suffering a severe attack of laziness and chronic sleepiness.

I vote for procrastination as the eighth deadly sin. It’s the sloth that keeps on giving…

Word count: 25,012 (halfway!)

I’m halfway done, but I’m still behind. I’ve decided to resurrect one of my characters because I’ll need him later to blow something up, so I have to go back and rewrite his death scene, substituting a new corpse. I also redesigned the starship, but most of the rewriting for that change is already done.

I’m beginning to contemplate the ending. Blowing things up is always a good bet, and there’s always the cheap flash-forward-forty-years ending. I don’t have a concrete idea yet; there’s still no outline and my novel is beginning to dissociate. I hope I’ll have it all reined in by the two-thirds mark on Wednesday.

Back to catching up…