So, it's been a while. How are ya? Have a nice holiday season?

Get plenty of good loot?

Eat a lot of good things, none of which made your butt swell up until it threatened to block the sunlight and throw Cleveland into a permanent shadow?

Me, too.

So...what's new?

Well, the new job continues to go well. I'm a lot busier than I was with the old one, which is all to the good. The days don't drag as much. I mean, I still devote an hour or two a day to my (other) blog, but some days it's a stretch to find the time, which is nice.

I'm wallowing in my annual Winter Hibernation. Don't go out much during the week, just curl up at home and mess with whatever project I have on hand at the moment. This year I'm struggling to master not one but two new GameBoy games. Final Fantasy Tactics and Sword of Mana.

I'm also, quite surprisingly to me, getting back into reading fantasy again. A Kind Friend started me off last year on a new fantasy series and then I discovered Terry Pratchett's Discworld series and now I'm catching up on the "in the universe of...." new Amber books and I discovered a couple of others this weekend. The nice thing about bailing on a genre for a while is that when you get back to it, you sometimes find that your favorite authors have finally released something new.

Other than that, I've been reading a lot of nonfiction, which is interesting to me but wouldn't be to you.

(At the moment, I am doing nothing more exciting than eating an apple and proofreading something I transcribed, wondering if "cryoglobulinemia" and "taida" are really words or if I'm just completely failing to read this person's handwriting.)

I was reading a discussion about the changes in fandom on a list and that made me start thinking, again, about why I bailed out on the whole thing.

The conversation stated with someone saying that someone new to her fandom had blithely announced that she liked X dynamic between two characters in a previous fandom so she just brought that with her and applied that to her "view" of the characters in this fandom.

No concern over whether or not X dynamic fit the characters or the universe or anything else. That's her kink and so that's what she writes.

Lots and lots of people writing fanfic take this approach any more.

Heck, everyone writes according to their personal preferences, biases, and kinks. The key is to make it work in the universe you're writing in. Make it...transparent. You can just write butch/femme relationships because that's what floats your boat. You have to check the personalities and the emotional relationship between two characters and see if it works for them.

But then, as I learned from the discussion, "canon" is one of those quaint, archaic concepts that don't matter much in fandom these days. Today's crop of "fans" don't care much about source material.

(Once there's a body of stories available, there's plenty of fanon around and from there on, most of the twits fans don't understand the difference between the two or see that there's any real necessity to make a difference. In fact, since fanon is usually spelled out in simple, one-syllable words, fanon is easier than canon, so I'd imagine a lot of the lazy swine fans prefer it.)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that for many of us, fandom was and is about the show/book/movie/whatever. That's passé.

For today's crop of fans, it's about each other.

Where stories used to be written essentially in isolation, and read the same way, by individuals sitting alone with no preconceptions of a story and no one telling them what to think ten seconds after they finished, today it's a hive activity.

People go into a new fandom and get a primer telling them what they're going to see, to like, and to talk about. They want the primer, okay? They don't want to take a chance on not fitting in with the rest of the group. Baa-baa. Sheep.

It's not about the writing. It's about the feedback. (There's nothing wrong with liking feedback. I think, though, that when it's the only reason you write, it's going to be hard if not impossible for you to write well. Because, let's face it, very few readers are discriminating. Writing well is something you do for personal satisfaction and for that 5 percent of readers who can tell the difference. It's a lot more work than transcribing a sweat-stained version of your late-night fantasies.)

And, of course, fifty idiots readers are sure to send gushing feedback on how wonderful it all is, no matter what a piece o'crap it was, because that's their function in the hive. They're the canned applause. (The metaphor is getting a bit mixed.)

Anyhow. To many of the more recent "fans" the source material isn't the reason for fandom, it's just the excuse. It's simply a jumping-off point and not to be used to stifle someone's creativity (Kill. Me. Now.) or limit their ability to write whatever they want. Everyone is "entitled" you see, and it's elitist to care about writing quality.

(Yeah, I'm still working on coming up with a different name for what I think of as "real" fandom. I'll let you know and issue formal invitations when I get the new universe organized and some curtains up.)

As I mentioned in that list discussion, it's like collectors of Matchbook cars invading the Monster Truck Rally fandom and demanding equal rights because, after all, it's all about fantasy automobiles, right?

What little I've seen of the current crop of stories over the past few months (which, admittedly, includes only excerpts sent to me by so-called friends who want to see my head explode) suggests that today's "stories" bear about the same resemblance to what I think of as "fanfic" as a Matchbook car does to a Monster Truck, too.

In both cases, we're talking about a small-scale, inoperative model of something that's almost but not quite entirely something different than the real thing.