editing progress report; life update; thoughts on the pronunciation of visual labels

[edenfalling]

Have received beta responses for "Secrets" chapter 10. Thank you, lasultrix and aichmetes! (Also, Cat? I love you and you are insightful as always, but goddamn it, write larger. Or use post-it notes. Your handwriting is as bad as my grandmother's, and that's saying something.)

*beats head against desk*

I knew it wasn't a great chapter. It suffers from A) being a transitional chapter, with the strongest scene occuring midway (and connecting only tenuously to the chapter's overall theme), B) attempting to paper over some awkward and/or inexplicable bits of CoS, and C) being written piecemeal over approximately 7 months. I already edited the hell out of it, and now I have two opinions on what needs more editing. Which is good! Don't ever think it isn't! But it is such a pain to pick my words apart and stitch them back together, especially when we're talking 9,000+ words, which themselves must mesh with the 90,000+ words in chapters 1-9.

*beats head some more*

I will do my best to fix it up and post it sometime next week.

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What I did this week:

1. Wrote about 300 words of "Finding Marea"
2. Wrote about 500 words of "Guardian"
3. Finally got around to downloading and arranging bits of "Chrysanthe," an original story (modern-day fantasy, dark-ish) that I left as an attachment on an email message for about a year
4. Wrote another 400 words of "Chrysanthe"
5. Read chapters 1-30 of Hunter x Hunter

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Speaking of #5, how does one pronounce that title? Hunter 'versus' Hunter? Hunter 'ecks' Hunter? Hunter 'times' Hunter? Inquiring minds want to know.

On a related subject, inquiring minds also want to know how to pronounce pairing abbreviations in Gundam Wing fandom. 1+2 -- meaning friendship and/or kissing but no sex between Heero and Duo -- seems likely to be 'one plus two.' But 1x2... ah now, how to say that? 1 'times' 2? For some reason, I've ended up mentally saying that as 'one by two,' as if I'm talking about the dimensions of a plank of wood. Hey, we all have our mental quirks.

Anyway, is there a commonly accepted verbalization of that style of pairing notation? Since FF.net banned the / character in story summaries, I've seen 'x' as a pairing notation appear in a growing number of fandoms... at least in fandoms that don't use portmanteau ship names (like McShep for McKay/Sheppard, or NaruSasuSaku for Naruto/Sasuke/Sakura, etc.).

For that matter, do people commonly pronounce the / in pairing names? That is, would you say 'aitch slash aitch arr' for H/Hr? Or would you just say 'aitch aitch arr'? I don't (mentally) pronounce the / mark, but since I've only discussed ships online, and therefore in writing, I have no audio references.

Comments

[thisistony.livejournal.com]

Uh, me RL friend and I just call it Hunterhunter. o_O *shrug* I never really thought about it, before.

As for GW, when I'm talking about 1/2/1 blah blah any of that nonsense, I just use their "real" names.

So much as saying the other ones, I just say "Narusasusaku"

*shrug*

[edenfalling]

Portmanteau ship names, like NaruSasuSaku, are designed to be pronounced as written. That's one of their virtues. (The downside is that often they make really ugly/non-euphonious words.)

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

I usually say "ecks" in HxH. For pairings, it's "one by two" or "Harry Hermione". I probably use full names because my primary fandom has six K's, three Y's, and three S's out of the top characters. (With an extra "Y" and "S" if you include alternate-form aliases.) I'm not sure it's even possible to abbreviate or use cutesy labels for the fandom.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

but can't yo udo the abreviatiosn withtheir full initials. hg/ss for instance?
i stil don't see why hr is used as a wa yto keep hermine apart form harry. why not use he?

[joisbishmyoga.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's another way to write the pairings in the Harry Potter fandom. I have no idea why it's Hr; the practice was firmly in place by the time I started reading in the fandom. Maybe the fans figured that "he" to indicate a girl was counterintuitive.

My primary fandom, however, not only isn't Harry Potter, but is one where over half of the characters have only first names. Two have family names, one can have a species name added (which is usually used to indicate a secondary form which that character can take), the one with the species name has the same initals as another character AND the first three letters of his name match yet another's. Full names are about the only way to make sense of any pairing labels. See?

(Youko) Kurama
Kuronue
Karasu
Koenma
(Yukimura) Keiko
Kuwabara (Kazuma - this is his personal name, but he goes by his family name)

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

ack. i meant to just ask if you coudld othe surname trick n your primary fandom liek we od in hp. thansk for explaining itthough. isn't other mang aalso havingthis issue( was this about manga/animeat all?)
wow, agodo observationf for HE, i still thin ki nthis casetis i sexaclt ywhy I personally onl yuse full initials, or ffull first names.

[edenfalling]

Yeah, logically Hermione should be shortened to 'He' to distinguish her from 'H' for Harry, but 'He' for a girl does look a bit funny in English.

Abbreviations in YuYu Hakusho would be an absolute nightmare, wouldn't they. I am now trying to come up with portmanteau ship names and failing at that, too -- they just don't look right.

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

I say 'haitch haitch arr'. :) (Actually, I don't - when more than two letters are involved in a pairing name, I just say the two names together. But whee, aspiration! I would say haitch dee, though.)
Yes, I never actually pronounce the /, but sometimes I leave a small pause to indicate its presence.

FFN banned the virgule? wtF? That MAKES NO SENSE.

And wrt Secrets, I have faith in you! In fact, here's a comforting story - when I realised where you were going with the valentine, I was critical at first, but then I read on and realised you were right and JKR was wrong. All hail Liz's wallpapering expertise!

[edenfalling]

FF.net has done some bizarre things to punctuation over the past six months. You can't use % in stories anymore, and I had to switch my scene dividing lines from

----------------------------------

to

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

so the uploading and editing programs wouldn't automatically delete them.

You also cannot use semicolons in story summaries (though they still work within stories, thank goodness), you can't use quotation marks in summaries, and you can't begin a summary with an apostrophe. I got around the latter by doing a summary like so: z 'You look like someone transfigured you...' etc.

I regard that site as a necessary evil. It's really the only place where there's so much mixing of various fandoms, which lets a reader explore various things, but there's so much utter dreck there, the rules are often nonsensical at best, and I want my punctuation marks back, damnit!

[iponly.livejournal.com]

For paring notations, I also just say the names or the portmanteau. Online, short words are faster, but offline the speed difference is much smaller, plus there aren't any summary limits. I think a lot of paring notations evolved from ffn's summary length limitations, and then the fans got a little over enthusiastic with them and turned out GW's math and the shipping names for Harry Potter. (When I was in GW fandom there was not even a plus, just 'x' and I hear that some people go even futher than + and x now.)

[edenfalling]

Ah, yes, summary length restrictions. Necessity is the mother of invention and all that.

[acechan.livejournal.com]

In the HunterxHunter anime, they pronounce it "Hunterhunter." This seems to be fairly standard for all things involving apparent multiplication in Japanese, but I think that American pairing notations just aren't intended to be verbalized. ...On the other hand, when I am talking about pairings, I usually pronounce them without a sound between the names (though GW did have me going "One by Two" for a while, so you're not alone there).

[edenfalling]

So the 'x' isn't pronounced at all? That's weird, but I can work with it.

Thus far, it appears that most people don't bother pronouncing the punctuation marks in pairing names, which is interesting and (in the case of / marks, at least), jibes with my habits.

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

In the case of H/Hr, I say out loud "Harry Hermione". But that may just be me.

[edenfalling]

I tend to pronounce what I see, so if it's written H/Hr, I say the letters. If it's written Harry/Hermione, I say the names.

I have been told, on occasion, that I can be too literal about things. :-)

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

ifthey mean hunter vs hunter they shoudl have used vs, ora narrow.
and indeedi either thought of'times' or'slash' (although when someone uses an x i actual ythin kof it as automaticall byeign r or nc-17 stuff whe hte / coudl be also lower.
as for pronounciatio nof pairings (and i have wondered for a logntiem whatthe 1+2 etc codes mean sincie also saw it insome hp fics on ff.net) I blieve when it's abbreviatedi mostly say jsuthe letters. i somtimes pronoucn ethe slash when i read whoel words but i' mnot sure. i know ifi talk to someone i remember once literal ysaign 'it's asirius dash james story) or something and icna't picture harry/hermione fiendship .the slash automatically makes me think of more.
i hae portmanteau. snupin. snack. snarry. i jsue maek four-letter pairs instead. adn dont' stat aboutthe 'ship names' like what wsa it...fire and ice *gulps*


another original story? did ou need yet antoher wip on yoru plate? its' agodo thign yo uan alternate betwen thigns and write 100-500 words o nsomethign differetn every day or hour.

[edenfalling]

Portmanteau can be done in different ways. In most fandoms, it's made by combining names into one word. In Naruto fandom, weirdly enough, the combination is made not by taking the start of one name and the end of the other, but by taking the first one or two syllables of both names, and capitalizing both.

So in, say, HP fandom, you take Snape and Lupin and make Snupin, but in Naruto fandom, you take (*grabs two names at random*) Shikamaru and Temari and make ShikaTem. Note that the 'T' in 'Tem' is capitalized, even though it's in the middle of the portmanteau ship name.

I like the Naruto portmanteau style better than the standard English-based fandom portmanteau style.

As for "Chrysanthe," it's not a new story. It's actually an old story that I started writing on somebody else's computer, and then emailed to myself. Then I forgot about it and left it floating around in the ether for nearly a year until I downloaded it last week.

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

There's also the old Pokémon style of shipping names that have been adopted by various other fandoms. Essentially, you take a pair, and use an aspect of that pairing to describe it.

For example, if we were to adopt Pokémon style to Naruto, a NaruIru pairing would become RamenShipping. Kakashi and Jiraiya would be either PervyShipping or IchaIchaShipping.

This style used to be all the rage with all fandoms, but the empty-headed fangirl/fanboy populace dropped it in favor of name combinations because this style required too much thought and effort.

[edenfalling]

I think I've seen that style used for some Yu-Gi-Oh pairings. It's fun and creative, but the downside is that you do need to be very familiar with the characters in question, and you have to make the same mental leap that the pairing name originator did. For someone just dipping her/his toes into a fandom, that's an extremely unhelpful notation style -- it almost seems designed to keep newcomers out of an exclusive inner circle.

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

From what I can remember, that was the original intent, as well. Fanfiction elitism. While I don't support that, I still find the notation style fun and imaginative.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

i liek that japanese portmanteau too. (not shikaTema? I thought yo usaid two sylables ffrom each name.)
HermiROn (because its' either one ortwo cylable for him.)
Hermisever. minervalbus. hargin. REMUSNYMPHA!! *gggles*
is downoloadable manga in graphic formats? i mean in some kidn of jpg or pdffile tha dosnt' have plai ntext bits? ialwas yfelt abit about it liek 'nto antoher packof superheros tgryig nto save t he world'.

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

Assuming you're still speaking of Naruto, I tend to use NarutoFan. You have to register, but it's free. Unless they've changed it in the last few months; I haven't been there in a while. Need to catch up.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

well it's mostly tha I m'blind .So if it's all in acarton way liek captioned images or no actual ocr text I cna't do anything wit hit.

[alliancesjr.livejournal.com]

Oh, okay. Well, there's also text translations. I'm pretty sure that they're on NarutoFan as well, but I don't know how good they are, or how descriptive they are. There are also some sites out there with episode (and chapter, for the manga) summaries, with varying amounts of description. I can start searching later tonight when I get home, if you like.

[erised1810.livejournal.com]

ooh thanks! I havea nextra day off this weekendso i'll chek that site out.
speakign of texttranscripts..do you happenedto know where I can find trasncritps liek that for other comicbooks/graphic novels?I tried to google but i got sentencesthat contain all those words but I'm also scaredto plunge into a site that is full of nonsensical adds adn other weirdstuff.
hey. perhaps i'l lendup readign manga this way after all lol.

[snaegl.livejournal.com]

Whoops, sorry about the handwriting (probably had something to do with the fact that I was writing on a clipboard in the bathtub--I do some of my best thinking in the tub, so it seemed like a good idea at the time...)! I'll try to rectify that on the next batch.

[edenfalling]

It's decipherable, except when I'm tired. When I'm tired, I lose the ability to decode the letters and make sense of the phrases at the same time. :-)