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1. The second day of training for RE went fairly well. There were some things MS and I didn't get to, and some things that I ran out of time and so only showed/told him about instead of having him do them himself while I supervised, but since he's closing with PM on Friday, and I told him to tell her which parts he hadn't actually done (mostly counting cigarettes and related stuff), hopefully she will run him through those tasks properly.
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2. I have been working on "Babies," another component fic in "The Transient and the Eternal," which is starting to behave rather like Snowfall and insist on zig-zagging to hell and back instead of winding down to an ending. First I thought it was going to be about Setsuna and Sara taking some kids in their apartment complex under their wing. Then it turned out to deal with one kid in particular. Then Lucifer insisted on showing up. Then the kid turned out to maybe be Kato's reincarnation, or at least very similar. And now I seem to have gone off on a tangent about truth and lies and Uriel, of all characters. *headdesk*
It all flows logically from one paragraph to the next, but I have completely lost hold of the thread I started from, and am struggling to find a path back to some point that resonates with the beginning and also feels like any sort of actual conclusion. Because right now, the story is nothing but middle, middle, middle -- I need an ending!
Argh. (4,300 words and counting. *sigh*)
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3. I am kind of dipping my toes into White Collar fandom -- thus far, I have watched the first two episodes of season one and read some meta and a bunch of fic. So far, I am cautiously pleased. I'm probably not going to be writing here, though.
I always feel a bit wrong-footed in audiovisual media-based fandoms as opposed to print-based fandoms. You will note, for example, that my four main writing fandoms -- Harry Potter, Naruto, Angel Sanctuary, and Narnia -- are two book series and two manga series, and that I do not consider the film or anime versions of those series canon. I am just not comfortable being hardcore fannish about audiovisual media... or no, that's not true. There are films and shows I have loved to pieces, sometimes more viscerally than I love books. But I am not comfortable being fannish in the same way. I will read fic, I will squee and bitch, I will even meta. But I will only rarely write fic.
There are various reasons for my discomfort with audiovisual media fandoms. First, I dislike the way film imposes its own time structure on me, rather than letting me experience a story at my own pace. The best I can do is pause or rewind or skip forward -- I can't slow down or speed up the way I can while reading, which drives me nuts. Second, I have to rewind and listen three or four times to get various bits of dialogue straight, because I am not great at distinguishing conversation from background noise, as people who know me in real life can attest. *wry* Third, I have a sympathetic embarrassment squick that kicks in much harder for audiovisual media than for print media, and that cringe reaction is exacerbated by my inability to control the pace of the story. (In other words, you can't skim a film.) Fourth, I can't take film with me the way I can carry a book around, nor can I find and rewatch little relevant details with anything remotely like the ease with which I can flip through a book to find a scene I am trying to remember, which makes it harder for me to feel I have the... the grasp, or the mastery, I guess, of the text that makes it easy for me to play around.
So film is simultaneously more immersive (because of its closer mimicry of real life, and its insistence on a real time experience of the story) and more distancing (because I can't get hold of it, and it is much more likely to be emotionally offputting) than words on a page. Which is why, as I say, I tend to feel a bit wrong-footed in audiovisual media fandoms.
But still, White Collar seems promising, which is odd as it's a show without any fantasy or science-fiction gimmick. We shall see if my interest continues.
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2. I have been working on "Babies," another component fic in "The Transient and the Eternal," which is starting to behave rather like Snowfall and insist on zig-zagging to hell and back instead of winding down to an ending. First I thought it was going to be about Setsuna and Sara taking some kids in their apartment complex under their wing. Then it turned out to deal with one kid in particular. Then Lucifer insisted on showing up. Then the kid turned out to maybe be Kato's reincarnation, or at least very similar. And now I seem to have gone off on a tangent about truth and lies and Uriel, of all characters. *headdesk*
It all flows logically from one paragraph to the next, but I have completely lost hold of the thread I started from, and am struggling to find a path back to some point that resonates with the beginning and also feels like any sort of actual conclusion. Because right now, the story is nothing but middle, middle, middle -- I need an ending!
Argh. (4,300 words and counting. *sigh*)
-----
3. I am kind of dipping my toes into White Collar fandom -- thus far, I have watched the first two episodes of season one and read some meta and a bunch of fic. So far, I am cautiously pleased. I'm probably not going to be writing here, though.
I always feel a bit wrong-footed in audiovisual media-based fandoms as opposed to print-based fandoms. You will note, for example, that my four main writing fandoms -- Harry Potter, Naruto, Angel Sanctuary, and Narnia -- are two book series and two manga series, and that I do not consider the film or anime versions of those series canon. I am just not comfortable being hardcore fannish about audiovisual media... or no, that's not true. There are films and shows I have loved to pieces, sometimes more viscerally than I love books. But I am not comfortable being fannish in the same way. I will read fic, I will squee and bitch, I will even meta. But I will only rarely write fic.
There are various reasons for my discomfort with audiovisual media fandoms. First, I dislike the way film imposes its own time structure on me, rather than letting me experience a story at my own pace. The best I can do is pause or rewind or skip forward -- I can't slow down or speed up the way I can while reading, which drives me nuts. Second, I have to rewind and listen three or four times to get various bits of dialogue straight, because I am not great at distinguishing conversation from background noise, as people who know me in real life can attest. *wry* Third, I have a sympathetic embarrassment squick that kicks in much harder for audiovisual media than for print media, and that cringe reaction is exacerbated by my inability to control the pace of the story. (In other words, you can't skim a film.) Fourth, I can't take film with me the way I can carry a book around, nor can I find and rewatch little relevant details with anything remotely like the ease with which I can flip through a book to find a scene I am trying to remember, which makes it harder for me to feel I have the... the grasp, or the mastery, I guess, of the text that makes it easy for me to play around.
So film is simultaneously more immersive (because of its closer mimicry of real life, and its insistence on a real time experience of the story) and more distancing (because I can't get hold of it, and it is much more likely to be emotionally offputting) than words on a page. Which is why, as I say, I tend to feel a bit wrong-footed in audiovisual media fandoms.
But still, White Collar seems promising, which is odd as it's a show without any fantasy or science-fiction gimmick. We shall see if my interest continues.
