I don't know why I treat that like it's an EVENT. It comes every week, after all. And it's not like my job is one of those hellhouse offices where you live for the instant the clock strikes five.
Still. Friday is a Good Thing in my world. Especially this week when I find I'm having a lot of difficulty with the time change. By the time I get home from work, it's completely dark out, which makes the evenings feel very, very short. I'll adjust, I know, but right now I'm having some psychological difficulties.
Of course, the fact that it's been drizzling ice for the past two days doesn't help. I do miss the sun and this morning's roads were horrendous in places. I whomped into a curb (came around a sharp corner onto a stretch of pavement that was solid ice) with a fair amount of force on the drive to work this morning. Guess I'd better go have my alignment checked.
Okay, we all know it's coming, so let's get it over with.
The diet.
I was not, in fact, down half a pound at last week's second weigh-in. I was up half a pound. Whatever. That still puts me down over two pounds for the week, okay?
The way I've been eating since then has discouraged any further weigh-ins, so I haven't returned to the scene of the crime yet. I have to check in with the FN's tonight, but I won't be having another official weigh-in until Monday.
Monday!
That's a significant Diet Date. Next week, is when I give it all up. I'm sick of the entire thing so I'm taking a month or two "off" of dieting.
The fact that I'm losing weight, getting thinner, developing muscle tone, and have gone down two sizes in pants notwithstanding, I'm just sick of the entire thing. I'm tired of measuring the food, writing it all down, and hauling myself 45-minutes across town in rush hour traffic twice a week to check in with the FN's.
I have a lot of qualities, good and (mostly) bad, but none of the good ones have anything to do with finishing what I start or being the kind of personality with drive, determination, and self-discipline.
So, anyhow, I'm going in Monday and Thursday next week, then I'm taking a little hiatus from my quest for youth. Then, sometime in December or, more likely, early January, I'll start up again so I can take off another 5 or 10 lbs before mid-February.
It's my hope that my doctor, even though she didn't tell me I should lose weight, will be appropriately appreciative of my efforts at better health.
I have no idea why I care. Like I said, she's never mentioned my weight at all.
Okay, the truth is that with my social life in the state it's been for the last two or three years, the only person in the world who ever sees me unclad is my doctor. If I get hit by a bus, I don't want anyone's last memory of me to be the flabby blob I looked down and saw at my last physical.
Also, as a consequence of my job, I've done a lot of research on health-related issues over the last year or so and I was shocked and actually impressed by the fact that I could lower my risk of developing heart disease, osteoporosis, and type 2 diabetes by forty percent or so just by dropping 20 pounds and taking a 20-minute walk five or six days a week.
Anyhow, even in my self-indulgent brain, that looks like a lot of profit for a fairly simple investment.
(Yes, if I give up smoking, I can lower my risks by another 30 percent, but I'm not ready for that yet.)
Next up: NaNoWriMo
Checking the old schedule and my social calendar, I still can't figure out how I'm going to find time to write 50k words in November. It may be time to take myself off the hook for this.
I do still encourage the rest of you to play along, though. I'll be here on the sidelines, cheering and making admiring noises.
The trouble with this blog thing is that it's a lot harder to do when you don't have anything to say.
Oh, by the way.
West Wing?
This week's episode?
Yes, we GET IT that if the President is out of sorts, everyone is out of sorts. Aaron Sorkin gave us this situation a couple of seasons ago and with a lot more nuance and subtlety.
I do hate being hammered over the head with plot points, especially when they should be subtext.
IMO, this episode looked like it was written by someone who didn't really understand or care about the ins and outs of politics, so they applied a heaping helping of melodrama to the show's personal relationships to try and distract from the lack of actual, you know, content in the episode. (Yeah, I know the writer worked with Sorkin in the past. IMO, that means there's even less excuse for how off-base this episode was.)
It was all retread ideas. Josh's supposed power in negotiating with Congress, CJ blurting out something she shouldn't have during a briefing, Amy burning all her bridges for one political 'win' - it was all rehashed moments from earlier episodes.
Someone please tell me that this isn't part of the show's vaunted "new direction"?
Someone please reassure me that the advertised addition of a "right-wing viewpoint" isn't going to be handled by making the current characters into two-dimensional idiots.
Pierce is very annoying, but Russell is surprisingly interesting. Much more so than I'd expected him to be.
I did not see Will deciding to switch jobs! Nor does it seem to me to be in character. Is this the man who is so driven to finish what he starts that he actually managed to win a campaign even though his candidate died before polling day? I don't think.
Why is C.J. suddenly the goat? Why is Leo suddenly on her case all the time in that ham-handed fashion?
Who are these people and where are my characters?
This was a travesty. It was nearly as bad as I feared the show would become after Sorkin's exit.
I don't like "ripppped from the headlines!!!!" television and a show can be timely without being exploitative.
A show can also be intelligent and absorbing without featuring a cast of unbalanced, unprofessional idiots, but you wouldn't have known that from this week's WW.
Posted by AnneZook at 11:21 AMYeah, it's Monday and I should be working, but I never quite got in the mood today, Oh, I've worked pretty much all day, but not with any degree of enthusiasm, you know?
I've made a lot of lists of things I should be doing. I haven't so much done most of them yet as I have, you know, contemplated the process of beginning each project. That kind of working.
Maybe if I squint, I can convince myself it’s a sort of zen approach?
And, hey, NaNoWriMo may be viable again. No, I don't have more spare time than I'd thought. In fact, just last night I found myself promising to attend a family reunion over the Thanksgiving holiday (auugghh!!) but an opening line for a book popped into my head and I was sort of thinking, well, why not?
Hey, it's a start. I mean, it's as much as I had to go on last year, okay?
Well, no, last year I had an opening line and a character name, come to think of it. But I still have five or six days to name my character, so there's time.
Actually, I have to have two main character names and it just occurred to me that one of them absolutely has to be named Fred. Being named Fred isn't going to improve the quality of his life, but I don't care so much about that. It will add some interesting texture to the character*, which is what's important.
(* That's pure swank since I don't yet know exactly who he is.)
Possibly I've been reading too much Eddings, but I've decided that whatever effort I make this year is going to be in the context of a fantasy novel. I like attempting fantasy novels. You're not bothered by mundane motivations of earthbound characters. I mean, if all else fails, you can invent a new species of some kind and they can conform to whatever set of drives and instincts suit your needs. And if your plot is improbably convoluted and tiresome, you can always have a character with magic power to get the hero out of sticky wickets.
Seriously, I have an idea or two about each of the two main characters, but if I tell you, you might steal my ideas.
I don't mind the theft so much, but the idea that you might take said ideas and write them better than I can really does worry me, so I'm keeping it all a secret.
Posted by AnneZook at 02:48 PMThe sun is still shining in Denver and we've still got temperatures of 80+ degrees. It's only going to last a another couple of days, then winter is likely to set in, but I'm relishing the warmth while it lasts. Relishing it from afar, I mean. Naturally I'm confined to an office during the day so I don't really get to bathe in the unseasonably temperate temperatures.
But. First things first. Monday's weigh-in! I'm proud to announce that by the time I got to the FN establishment Monday, I was down 2-3/4 pounds!
The bad news, of course, is that last night I was attacked with an incurable case of the munchies and I'm having to spend today making up for the extra calories I consumed. I don't expect to be down more than a half pound at tomorrow's weigh-in, but that puts me at over 3 lbs in a week, and I can totally live with that kind of weight loss.
Also, did I mention that I've added "stairs" to my daily exercise routine? I'm averaging 200 a day, which isn't as impressive as it sounds when you realize that I do them in 40-stair increments.
Next up: Upper body firming. (A body is a lot of work.)
Although I've identified a number of people planning to dive into this year's NaNoWriMo, I'm backing away from the idea of participating. I just can't figure out how I'll carve out enough time to make it work. My social calendar for November is already getting a little crowded and I find I'm not willing to cancel any of the things I have planned in order to sit around writing dreck.
The key, I suddenly realized, was that the event is a writing exercise for people who want to, you know, write. I really don't, so I have to ask myself what the point of carving 200 or so hours out of my November schedule is.
And then I have to tell myself that there's no real point, it's just something I did last year. This year, the sun is shining, it's warm out (well, it is today), I have four other projects underway at home, a number of social events planned (in my life, even lunch with a friend counts as a "social event"), and a lot of reading I'd like to do.
So. I may not be participating. No firm decision either way, but I thought I'd mention it since I've been heckling y'all to participate.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:07 PMHowdy.
Okay, some new rules.
First, No one is allowed to write and demand that I participate in NaNoWriMo unless they're planning to struggle through the ordeal themselves.
Hmmm. Okay, that was just one new rule, but still. It's amazing the number of people who'd like to see me become entangled in the writing trap again but who aren't willing to stick their own necks out.)
Next, the diet. (It's my blog, okay?) I haven't weighed in "officially" yet, since I'm still (technically) at work today, but I have no fears from my upcoming encounter with the FNs. This morning's weigh-in at home was 1-1/2 pounds below what it was last Thursday, so I know I lost something with my (really) strenuous efforts to Be Good over the weekend. (I kinda binged at lunch on Saturday, but I made up for it with a celery-and-lettuce-supper.)
I did, in fact, go shopping. Two new pair of jeans, a pair of cargo pants, and one pair of dressier pants for work. (I can wear jeans, everyone else does, but these made me look thin, so I bought them. Thin, beautiful, intelligent and wealthy. It's an amazing pair of pants.)
No shirts or blouses, though. I took a good look at my wardrobe (and took seven pair of pants and eleven blouses to Goodwill) and decided that some hemming of my wardrobe full of over-long polo shirts would carry me though.
I spent yesterday working on the sewing project, which made me cranky since I am not domestic, but at least now I have clothes I can wear. I already owned an appalling number of blouses, most of which I haven't worn in the last couple of years but all of which now fit.
Not only that, I have pants two sizes smaller than I was wearing two months ago, which is, as you can imagine, a major ego boost. Since my diet buddy is out of town until Thursday evening, I needed a bit of positive reinforcement to keep me from, cough, having any little dietary accidents over the next four days.
Actually, now that I think of it that way, it occurs to me that this is a bad week for me to have made a breakthrough. I could have wallowed in salted nuts, potato chips, donuts, and fresh-baked bread, but noooo, I have to go and get all motivated and stuff and now I'll be eating celery and (blech) fish for four days instead.
If this diet wasn't working so well, I'd quit right now.
Lemme see...what else? I have to leave in ten minutes to go to a meeting off-site, so I'm trying to think fast and in consequence locking up my brain.
I meant to watch Andromeda, really I did. I understand Nick Lea is supposed to have a recurring role this season (although I'm not exactly sure which week he's showing up) but...I just can't bring myself to do it. I liked the show in the first season and then about halfway through the second season it started to really suck and then in the beginning of the third season it sucked really, really hard, so I quit watching it and now I have this sort of knee-jerk aversion to the very idea of it. If anyone turned it on and saw NL, please let me know how it went, okay?
Other than that, and to return to our original subject briefly, I have actually been considering NaNoWriMo seriously. I haven't gone as far as pulling out last year's disaster effort and looking at it, but I've been trying to get my brain accustomed to the idea of spending thirty straight evenings writing.
And now I'm out of time.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:24 PMMy neck, pervert. It has been for the last two or three days and it's not getting much better. Unfortunately I'm in the middle of an internet research project at the office and there's nothing, just nothing better for a stiff neck than sitting in one place, mousing around the 'net for eight or nine straight hours. Doing it three days in a row really adds to the benefits, as you can imagine.
Last night I had to turn on the little heater in my bedroom because it was so cool. Today it's 90 degrees outside. I love autumn in Colorado.
Okay, let's get the usual diet update over with. Last night I weighed in for the first time in two weeks. I hadn't lost an ounce. I had a bitty temper tantrum (why, oh why do I do those things, as though it's their fault that I haven't lost any weight?*) and then condescended to accept a little one-on-one counseling. If I follow this guy's instructions closely, he says I should easily expect to see a 2 lb loss by Monday. Yeah.
But it's worth a shot, so I'm making a few dietary and exercise changes and we'll just wait and see what happens. In any case, you'll be pleased to know that I'm sticking with my quit date of November 15. Whatever weight I have or haven't lost by then will have to be enough.
(* It's worth mentioning, or even it it's not, I'm compulsively honest so I'm mentioning it, that I reviewed my private "sins and omissions" chart this morning and discovered that I've been indulging myself to a shocking extent over the last 2-3 weeks, so it's not really surprising that I wasn't losing any weight. In one four-day period, I ate an entire "grab bag" sized bag of Fritos.)
On the NaNoWriMo front, I've been invited to a gathering on 10/26. Apparently the Front-Range participants have a forum on the NaNoWriMo site and they do a couple of "encourage each other' type meetings during the course of the month. I haven't responded to the invitation because I still don't know if I'm going to be participating. I mean, aside from another characterization-free smutfest, I've no idea what I'd write about.
A friend wrote me privately, musing over her own ideas for a novel if she should decide to participate. I confess, I'm strongly encouraging her to stay away from writing anything fannish. First, I don't want to be the only person in the contest writing pointless dreck and second, if she's anything like me (which she is), the kind of writing she's currently blocked on isn't the place to start when she's just trying to exercise her writing muscles.
Ideas were never my strong suit, anyhow. Personally I'm still considering picking up last year's chunk o'cheese and adding another 50k to it. It was just starting to develop a plot and some coherent characters last year and I'm a bit curious to know what, you'll pardon the expression, 'the muse' had in mind when it bypassed my brain to insert the aforesaid plot development in a place where I fully expected to need another 6k sex scene to pad out the word count.
There weren't any pirates in the story, a fact that I still regret. The only one of my own fandom efforts I remember with any fondness was a foray into the pirate genre. While the story itself was more than usually inane, I don't think I said all I have to say about pirates so maybe this new universe would be a good place to expand on that theme. (I could do some meaner pirates. That last bunch turned out to be kinda swishy.)
I diagrammed the universe all out last year. I have a world map, at least four, distinct cultures including social structure, religion, economics, and geography, two branches of "gipsy" or "rover" subcultures that interact with each of them, and some sketchy notions (they're not quite full-fledged ideas) of what conflicts motivate each of them. (Some days I'll do almost anything to avoid actually writing. World-planning is a lot more entertaining than writing.)
Okay, what else is new? I may not be losing weight (Hah! I'll bet you thought we were done with the diet topic for the day, didn't you?) but I'm losing inches. I'm going to have to buy new pants and most of the shirts I bought this past summer, all purchased a little large to accommodate my desire to camouflage the increasing bulk of my increasing butt, are starting to hang off my shoulders. So, this weekend's excursions will include some shopping, a pastime dear to my heart.
I can't think of anything else worth saying today. I mean, unless you'd like to hear my opinion on the article I'm currently reading, A Clinical Information System Research Landscape, I think that's pretty much it.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:29 PMWell, that NaNoWriMo entry sparked some enthusiasm. I wonder if my insulting response to the comments inspired anyone to sign up for it? I really should be nicer to my friends. If I made New Year's Resolutions, I'd make that mine this year, but I don't, so I'll just make a mental note and file it away between, "Stop smoking, stupid" and "Climb the pyramids."
Someone write and asked me if I really intend to go through that again. I still don't know, okay?
I spent, at a guess, 100 hours of office time on last year's effort. I don't have 100 hours to spare this year, so I'll have to cut into those few precious, "me time" evening hours this year. Not surprisingly, I find it easy to commit to wasting my employer's time but not as easy to agree to waste my own time.
I have books to read, book reviews to write, television to watch (not much of that), friends to see, Christmas shopping to do (it's November, after all) and daily, 30-minute I'm-doing-it-for-my-butt-okay? walks to take. I also have to bathe, eat, clean house, do laundry, and call my mother. (Okay, I don't do those last three every day, but when they need done, they need done.)
There's also this complicated diet thing. I can no longer go home and settle down happily with half a bag of potato chips for supper. Now I have to eat healthy food and the single most irritating thing about healthy food is that it has to be purchased fresh two or three times a week (add "grocery store" to the list of near-daily tasks) and then cooked up every evening. Which, naturally, produces a correspondingly larger pile of dishes that have to be washed every day.
I swear, I don't know how women with full-time, outside jobs, husbands, and kids manage it. I can't wait until I'm thin (well, thinner) and can go back to occasionally stuffing prepared food into my face to save time.
Anyhow. What I thought I'd do is go home tonight and take a look at last year's manuscript effort to see if it inspires in me any desire to re-write or finish the story. If not, I have a couple of weeks to think about whether or not there's a different idea I'd like to work on or at least one that leaves open the possibility that I could write a few reams on it without much effort.
(Of course, I'm not ruling out last year's approach. Last year I thought of a character name and then wrote a story for it. Like I said in the 'comments' section, it's a lot easier to write if you're not concerned with quality.)
On a list I'm on, we occasionally discuss the idea of writing 'romance novels' in the Harlequin or bodice-ripper tradition. If all else fails, I might do that this year. It would be m/m, of course. I think an m/m bodice-ripper would be fun to write, don't you? I mean, you can't use up five thousand words discussing 'heaving bosoms' but that same space could be much better filled with a description of sweaty chests anyhow. (Not to be all sexist or anything, of course. To each their own.)
Secret to NaNoWriMo Success #1 – Always write a story with sex in it.* It's easy to insert a sex scene every five or ten pages and you can drag most of those scenes out for 3-5 thousand words. This is key when word count is all that counts.
Secret to NaNoWriMo Success #2 – Always start with a virgin. Last year my virginal hero soaked up around 10k words just thinking about losing his virginity.
* For those who, like myself, get hives from writing sex scenes, let me assure you that it's a lot easier when you know no one will ever read it. You can be as contrived, as hackneyed, and as formulaic as you want.
Anyhow, it's all academic at this point. I really don't know if I'm willing to make the commitment.
Posted by AnneZook at 07:40 AMWould you walk for 40 minutes to lose a hundred pounds in a year?
Would you walk for 20 minutes to lose 50 pounds?
My roommate, She Who Shall Be Cursed for getting me into this diet, walks for 40 minutes (20 minutes, twice a day.) She's averaging 2 pounds a week on this diet. I walk for 20 minutes, once a day. I'm averaging 1 pound a week.
Understand, neither of us will be losing 100 or even 50 pounds. There's no way we're staying on this diet for an entire year. We're already intermittently homicidal after only 60 days.
Still, it does occur to me that if I dragged my behind out of bed and took a walk before work in the morning, now while the weather is still nice, I could drop another five pounds in the three weeks I have left before I go on "maintenance."
Granted, the supplements are a bit expensive. We're spending about $60/week on the supplements and vitamins. On the other hand, my grocery bill has dropped to $12 a week, so I'm actually spending almost the same amount of money on food. (It's amazing how much you save when you're not going through four bags of potato chips and a couple of bags of candy a week and eating dinner out two or three times a week. Food is expensive.)
(I think I'm blogging too much. It's become such a habit with me to type in the html codes for the formatting I use most often that I find myself "formatting" text in documents that aren't supposed to have html code in them.)
I'm don't really obsess about the diet as much as these blog entries make it seem. It's just that today I treated myself to lunch out, for the first time in six weeks, and I sat down and ate my entire day's allowance of food at once.
I dread the moment when all of those carbs wear off.
I have no idea what I'm going to do for dinner tonight (well, yes, I do, because all I can eat is lettuce and celery), but one thing I do know is that tonight's 20 minute walk had better be 40 minutes to work some of those calories off.
I have no self-discipline at all. It's very sad. I could blame PMS, but I've already been blaming PMS for everything I've done for the past six days and after a while that excuse starts to get a bit tarnished. I'm a glutton, that's all.
I have absolutely nothing to say that could be of interest to anyone besides myself today. I'm getting new tires on my car tomorrow. That's the weekend's planned excitement.
Last night I watched Will and Grace and it wasn't very good and now I'm regretting having given up CSI.
I finished The Belgariad and now I'm working my way through The Mallorean with occasional forays into Jingo (a Discworld novel that I somehow missed when I was buying and reading them the first time through).
But
I was thinking about fanfiction last night.
Specifically I was thinking about when I used to write the stuff. Every so often I stop and marvel over that.
There was a time when I did nothing but write. I wrote at work, pondered story events in my head as I drove to and from work, and hogged up the computer at home every night and half of every weekend. One year I went to Escapade and missed one entire day of the con because I was busy writing a story. I wrote incessantly and obsessively. It was like the stories were grabbing me by the brain and forcing their way out through my fingers. Writing was almost all I thought about. (You'd think the results would have been more worthwhile, but that's a different rant.)
And then, one day, it just sort of...went away. Poof. The one time I actually tried to write a story since that time was a dismal failure. I couldn't think of anything to say and, worse yet, I couldn't think of any clever dialogue not to say it with.
Isn't that weird? I think that's weird.
It's another subject that's on my mind these days, because NaNoWriMo is coming up again soon and I have to decide whether or not to write another novel this year. The people who sucked me into playing that game last year both wimped out without finishing their 50,000 words, which made me a little bitter, I promise you.
The thought occurs to me that I could work on last year's novel, add another 50k to it, or I could write something completely new and different.
I don't feel any actual urge to write any more, but as I recall, the freedom to write without regard for quality or logic was a lot of fun last year. Not like writing something that someone will someday actually read. (The grammar police may come after me for that last sentence.)
Anyone want to play? It's easier than you think, you know. I didn't even start until the 7th of November last year and I easily got my 50,000 words written before the end of the month.
Any takers?
Posted by AnneZook at 03:20 PMWell, gosh, it looks like I forgot you again.
That could be because I was once again enmeshed in the toils of Real Work, or it could be just that I'm not back in the habit of blogging yet. After all, Alvin's out of town today and he was out yesterday, as well. What's up with me that I didn't take the opportunity to goof off for hours on end?
Or, maybe it's just that nothing that interesting has happened to me since last Wednesday.
I have lost no more weight and was about to quit the diet in fury (after eating massive quantities of "forbidden" foods on Sunday) when the PMS Monster subsided and I realized that it was Just One Of Those Things.
Today I've talked myself into sticking with it for another four weeks. Until my birthday, in fact.
Regardless of what weight I have or have not lost, or the state of the world in general, I'm eating barbecue for my birthday. And I'm eating a ton of it, okay? I'm not counting the slices of bread, weighing the chunks of sausage, or scraping the sauce off of the beans. I'm eatin' every bite I get within forking distance of.
And then I'm taking the leftovers home and eating them for dinner later that same night.
Hmph.
Anyhow.
We did turn Lyon's Den back on again on Sunday and were even less impressed with it than last week. I doubt we'll be trying it again.
Also, in Mitch Pileggi's honor, we tried Tarzan on Sunday and pretty much found it as unwatchable as we'd expected. (No, it wasn't a case of pre-sabotaging ourselves. It's just that you have to figure when the promos for the premiere don't interest you, it's unlikely that the show itself is going to turn out to be a favorite.)
The Tarzan character was cute enough, from the neck down, and I give him full marks for the unselfconscious way he knuckled around the screen imitating a giant ape, but he really wasn't that interesting. I saw no chemistry between him and his "Jane" and am not that interested in seeing Pileggi play a bad guy, even though it appears it will be less of an all-or-nothing evil role than I'd expected. Plus which, the plot was stupid, as well as being mind-numbingly predictable.
We do plan to try Mark Harmon's new show again tonight. I sort of enjoyed it last week, although not as much as during the premiere episode, but then I really like CSI so I expected to. It's not as intelligent as CSI, though, and my roommate doesn't care for the genre, so I don't know how long we'll keep watching it.
It's very sad when a new television season starts and you don't pick up a single new show. I dunno. Maybe we didn't try enough of them.
West Wing was...less wonderful last week. I'm hoping against hope that this isn't the beginning of the end for the show. I disliked the way the characters were twisted out of character in order to provide an unrealistic, and too-quickly resolved "crisis." John Goodman continued to be impressive, though.
That show had better not tank, okay? I'm giving up the opportunity to see Spike on Angel to keep watching West Wing. If West Wing goes down the tubes, someone's gonna get hurt.
I'm being hurt, okay? Just knowing Spike's probably up to something and I'm not getting to see it is...painful.
I gave up CSI, by the way. My summer infatuation with Will and Grace was just too strong and I wanted to know what was going to happen. CSI wasn't as good last season as it has been and I decided to make the switch.
In other news...well...what?
So, how about that California recall election? No...sorry...wrong place for that kind of talk.
I'm re-reading Edding's Belgariad series at the moment. I have a huge stack of non-fiction, but I've been in the mood for escapist lit the past few weeks. (Let's take a moment to offer fresh kudos to Piglet, who encouraged me to read it in the first place.)
I also have about two more books in Pratchett's Discworld series to read. Those should keep me busy until this mood wears off.
I'm just not a very exciting person, okay? I'm just not.
Posted by AnneZook at 03:59 PMI remain entirely amused by the way people consider fanfiction an internet phenomenon. Apparently the reams and reams and reams of stuff written in the 70s and 80s and 90s (yes, offline fanfiction is real, Virginia) has no real existence.
I also remain amused by the way these articles always carefully fail to mention things like the constant stream of "Sherlock Holmes" stories that have come out in the last ninety years because, of course, that's not fanfiction because someone got paid to write it and those are professionals and not just, you know, someone writing. (The fact that some fanfic authors get paid for their stories seems, still, to be a secret.)
And there's the obligatory titillation about Kirk/Spock. If this were still the 30s or 40s, we might all be writing things like a certain famous, "Was Watson a Woman?" (or whatever the exact title was, it's been a million years since I read it) but it's not, so we're speculating in today's daring new field which is all about single-gender relationships and I think it's okay that K/S, the fandom that brought slash out of the closet, is used to define "that kind of thing" in fandom. It's better than the alternative which is most of the XF or the underage S&M HP stuff that's out there.
And, of course, there's the obligatory self-congratulatory author who, at the ripe, old age of 18 has no problem declaring herself as one of fandom's most prolific authors.
I don't even need to search her out to know her stuff is going to suck.
(Why is it that 98 percent of the time, those congratulating themselves publicly on their writing prowess are those whose work falls among the two percent worst stuff out there? Why is it that 90 percent of those who swear they'll never write again if they don't get feedback telling them how wunnerful their sh*t is are the ones who write the least coherent, least readable, least interesting, most half-assed stories on the 'net?
But I refuse to get sidetracked by that because I've ranted about it ad nauseum (sp?) in the past and today's topic is a different one.)
I'm never sure exactly what these articles are trying to accomplish. Do each of these 'journalists' discover fanfiction all on their little own and bring it out like a shiny, new toy to share with the public or what? Are they, in some way we aren't privy to, related to or desirous of sleeping with one or more of the 'authors' they interview? Are they in desperate need of quickly written copy fifteen minutes before a crucial deadline?
Anyhow. I think by now both of you well know my opinion of the havoc the internet has wrought in fandom.
Too much, too fast. Every idiot with a keyboard decided they were entitled to an opinion, no matter how manifestly insane said opinion was. Every dittohead with experience of viewing two or three episodes decided they were a 'writer' and shoveled their half-baked debris onto the 'net.
(Even I did it and I promise you that had the process involved anything more strenuous than staring vacantly at a wall while my fingers did the walking, I would never have involved myself in the process. And I wasn't the only one.)
The highway of fandom is littered with the carcasses of those who labored under the illusion that they could write and the road-kill piles higher every day. Were it not for the inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder (way to mix a metaphor, there, gir), I might cherish hopes that some day a balance would return and that those few, gifted writers who possess such rare attributes as the ability to tell a coherent story and spell the characters' names correctly might return to the ascendant but, alas, I suspect that that will never be.
I should point out that I'm not actually in a bad mood today (regardless of references to 'road kill' that were inspired by a certain doggish author that those who need to know will identify without further clues).
I'm working on my syntax problem, I promise you. Having recently seen someone strip four pages of my (non-fiction) prose down to a terse four paragraphs, I have come to accept that I have a problem.
That's the first step, right? Admitting that you're powerless over grammar and that you need The Manual of Style?
I do, in fact, know people who could help. I know the kind of people who know, I mean actually know the rules for when you hyphenate "on site" and when you don't. It was explained to me and has something to do with a noun but I wasn't really listening so I can't pass the education along.
I even know people who not only know but who could, if asked, explain to me whether or not I'd spelled ad nauseum correctly and offer six interpretations, both literal and figurative, together with footnotes documenting famous usages of the phrase in classical literature.
There are times, not many because I’m an egomaniac, but there are times when I wonder why some of the people who let me hang out with them let me hang out with them.
That sentence might have needed another comma. I know people who would know.
The old diet is going well today, which might account for the improvement in my mood since yesterday. This morning's pre-dawn weigh-in (my favorite, since it's the lowest I ever see) was mighty-fine, indeed. According to the scale, I've lost an impressive 13-1/2 pounds since August 19. My jeans are definitely loose today. And baggy in the butt, which is less pleasing. These stupid jeans are almost new.
Still, the whole diet thing is a drag and my roommate and I have agreed that it's time we put an ending date on it. She's stopping 10/20. I'm stopping 10/24 because she had a four-day head start on me when we started. Then it's the whole "stabilization and maintenance" process which goes on for I don't know how long and then I'll be free.
Not free to eat the way I used to do but at least free from the tyranny of weighing out a careful two ounces of tuna for lunch or a scant one ounce of chicken for dinner on a daily basis.
I intend to go wild. I'll eat Mexican and consume six, eight, or even ten tortilla chips without guilt. I'll have a side-salad before my Italian meal and consume the restaurant's delicious oil-and-vinegar dressing without shame. One evening, when I'm hungry, I'll go to the kitchen and grab a handful of crackers and I won't even count them. And one day I'll just go out and eat barbecue without planning three days in advance to "save" enough calories to allow me to have six, uninterrupted bites.
Totally wild and crazy.
It's one of the "sad but true" facets of getting older that one's rebellions become so small. So completely trivial. It's hard to imagine that the woman currently plottingmto eat four whole ounces of sausage at one sitting, once participated in a vocal (but non-violent) protest against the KKK.
Does life move to a smaller scale as one ages? Does the weight of years of experience teach one to accept a lessened sphere of influence? Does the magnitude of the world and its problems become too much for one to bear after a space of decades?
Is one inevitably to wind up speaking of oneself in the third person or is that a pretentious affectation adopted by just a few?
It's true, though. People who once wanted to change the world become content with owning two pairs of comfortable shoes so they can change them whenever they want.
It's hard to know if we scale back our expectations, become calloused to the world's ills, or just get bored with it all.
I know my generation started out with Vietnam and Richard Nixon then lived through Reagan and Iran-Contra, so even the current ills of our society and the venality of those in charge are more "business as usual" to us than outrages to be fought with passion and conviction.
Doggone it, I'm in a good mood and before I get back to accomplishing at least one of the many things I intended to do while Alvin is out of town, I am determined to spread a little cheer around the world.
Actually, I'm hungry at the moment. I'm having an extra supplement. They say if you get hungry, don't eat snacks (unless it's lettuce or celery), just have an extra supplement and it will actually make you lose weight faster. We'll see. This morning's supplements were cappuccino and mocha hot chocolate. Right now I'm having one that tastes like grape kool-aid. I have to admit that they did a good job of making this stuff taste good.
I'm still working on a cheerful thought but I'll have to get back to you on it.
Posted by AnneZook at 12:20 PM