February shitposting, day 16

I skipped a week, but whatever!

Today's randomly chosen theme is: the first white paper of chance

I believe a "white paper" is some kind of technical government term, but I am just going to talk about paper in general.

So, coincidentally, I was talking to Nick about paper colors on Wednesday near the end of our long conversation, and it turns out we have radically different feelings about white paper. I find white paper intimidating (unless it's computer paper I'm folding and cutting into snowflakes, because in that case the whole point is to mangle it). But for writing, white paper tends to jam me up in a sort of... panic is the wrong word. But I feel that white paper means anything I put on it must be CORRECT, and so I get... performance anxiety, maybe?

I get around this in various ways. One is to use scrap paper, because then it's already ruined so who cares if I mess up more. The other is to use colored paper. This is why all my little notepads are yellow, because it's a friendly color and if I cross stuff out, or misspell things, or add things in weird places after the fact, it doesn't matter.

Nick, conversely, finds that using white paper means he doesn't worry about making mistakes because the white paper sort of purifies them so they don't matter, because the paper itself is so lovely. For him, colored paper jams him up because it will only compound his inevitable goof-ups instead of salving them.

So we both have this notion that white paper is somehow good or pure, but I feel that my mistakes ruin it and therefore feel guilty, whereas he feels that the paper uplifts his mistakes and therefore feels comforted.

...

The whole thing is, of course, ridiculous, but cultural expectations are powerful things and we all interact with them in idiosyncratic ways. *wry*

elves behaving badly :)

So, over the past couple-three weeks I accidentally fell down a hole into Silmarillion fandom.

The surprise is that it's taken me this long, really, since The Silmarillion was always my favorite part of Tolkien's Middle-Earth stories, ever since I read it when I was 10 years old. I think this is for precisely the reason a lot of people find it weird: namely, that it reads like an old-fashioned, formally-phrased collection of myths/legends/fairy-tales from some not-quite-European culture, and I lived for that kind of book when I was eight to twelve years old.

I have also started rereading The Silmarillion itself, which is a fun rediscovery since after rereading it dozens of times from age 10 to roughly 18, I hadn't opened it for nearly twenty years. I think I really must get my hands on the rest of the "apocryphal" works both because writing process is fascinating, and because conlangs are fascinating. That may take a while, though, since I do have a bunch of other stuff going on in my life.

Anyway, this is probably not going to be a writing fandom for me, but I am having loads of fun reading through decades of other people's work. And that's one reason I've been a little distracted for a while. :)