Flutterings

Open Palm Press has been producing a series of pocket-sized poetry booklets for Haiti relief. #10 in the series consists of three poems by me: "Drop," "Portion," and "Assignment."

The cost is $3 per copy; please click here for details on how to place an order. Thanks!

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My minister is a great pastor overall, but she does have her blind spots: I encountered one of them this past Sunday when, in her sermon, she spoke with pity of someone whose social life was primarily online rather than in the "real" world.

*sigh*

It's easy to point out where the disconnects stem from: the minister is around 15-20 years older than me and an extrovert. Her job depends on her being able to interact with people face-to-face at will 24/7 with equanimity, no matter how unreasonable some of those people can be. (This is something I really wish more people considering div school would get asked sooner rather than later: in my experience, too many of them aren't realistic about the demands of providing pastoral care.)

Whereas my own work depends on me spending a lot of time alone, and that's how I prefer it. I do have a decent set of social skillz - this week, I started/sustained a fair number of conversations during Sunday's coffee hours, chaired a meeting, attended two lunches and a wine tasting, and have a third lunch date lined up for tomorrow. I would've gone to movies with the BYM Sunday night if I hadn't fallen asleep.

But these are equally "real," in my book: Trading snark and squee with another tennis junkie over the ongoing mishegoss that is Indian Wells. (Short version: Nadal looking great, how did I end up rooting for Nico over Blake, and davai Elena!) The box of gorgeous tea that just arrived in the mail, from a longtime Snape/Lupin-and-now-manga copine. Postcards from St Kitts, South Africa, downtown Seattle... The gift-card-as-casserole another longtime Snupin friend sent when my mother died two years ago today, along with literally dozens of condolence notes from others. The acquaintances and strangers who quote and rec not only my fics but my poems (and sometimes my rants, eep). The fun of being generous in like wise to others. The quiet satisfaction of volunteer work done late at night and behind the scenes so that old texts and new stories reach more people.

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I enjoyed reading Ivan Ljubicic's perspective about various aspects of playing on the ATP tour. As a fan of both Roger and Rafa, I loved the opening:

The people on tour are different than they were 15 years ago. You see more players doing so much more fitness. I remember coming into the locker room 10-15 years ago and guys would be talking about other sports and now if you want to survive you have to be focused 100 percent. That's what Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal have done for our sport as they are asking 100 percent out of all of us. If you are not totally committed, you can't even play with them, and I'm not even talking about beating them, I'm talking about how ridiculous you would look out there if you are not playing your best and totally there mentally because you can't even compete.

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The current haul from the library includes a concert recording of Chess (the one with Josh Groban, Idina Menzel, and Adam Pascal as the leads), Tired of Being Tired (like my tangent above, I don't truly expect it to say much of anything new to me, but seeing old truths in different type is sometimes the kick my brain needs to get out of its ongoing ruts), and Posy Simmonds's Tamara Drewe, blurbed as a graphic-novel retelling of Far from the Madding Crowd (my favorite Thomas Hardy novel).

But before I get to any of those: thank-you notes, housework, spreadsheets, several hundred more words, and a long walk (or at least twenty minutes involving some variation of situps). Onward!

On the sixth day of Christmas, my loves presented to me a Sir Impey/Viennese Opera Singer ficlet (from Swooop, who spoils me rotten) and a bag of really terrific tea (from westernredcedar), which helped make for a very pleasant end to 2007. At midnight, I was sipping my second cup of tea and going through some pages at Distributed Proofreaders. (I fell hard for George A. Birmingham's A Padre in France (1918), an account of working as a British Army chaplain during WWI.)

On the seventh day of Christmas, I didn't do much in the way of writing or reading, but I did walk the dog and parts of my house are now less ooky. I also looked over a chapter of a friend's novel-in-progress and typed up a quasi-detailed crit of it. regan_v rec'd my Snape/Lupin in Chicago fic. (And speaking of recs, Nineveh posted an excellent cross-section of Wimsey recs at crack_van last month. (ObDisclosure: she says very nice things about Bringing His Lordship Around and its companion drabble.)

On the eighth day of Christmas, I woke up way too early, partly fretting over things not yet done and partly musing over whether I had gotten too detailed in the crit. It's just occurred to me that, being by nature a poet, I am not the most efficient writer or critiquer of prose, because I operate primarily at the micro-level of words rather than the macro-level of narrative structure. I've tried following the popular dictum of gutting out the proverbial "shitty first draft" and then going back to finetune everything, and it not only doesn't work for me, it kills the fun.

It's a different ballgame when one is writing on contract; I can force myself to "get it done, fix it later" when my mortgage payment depends on me turning in x thousand words or y hundred slides on time. But when I'm writing "for the love," spew-drafts just end up wasting my time, because I tend to discover the truth about my characters in how they (fail to) talk and appear to each other (which is how I repeatedly end up delighted when they say things I hadn't expected...). I know that many writers do a lot of world-building and character-sketching before they ever write the first line of their stories, and I imagine I should try more of that myself - but, again, I work instinctively at micro- rather than macro-level storycrafting, and that's how I've sometimes discovered I've got a plot on the wrong track: when I stall out trying to come up with the right words, or if I try to skate past a scene that really needs to take place onstage, that's when I'm most likely to realize I need to reconsider what I had in mind. I don't see these things at the macro-level, because there, everything looks like it's plausible; it's when I tell a character, "You need to say this now" and she retorts, "You're making me sound like a SNL parody of a Bronte heroine" that I realize, oops. (This was my deal-breaker when it came to the seventh Harry Potter book: I realize Lupin's "It is I" speeches are a very small part of an exceedingly long book, but the combination of melodramatic and illogical is still too much for me. I cannot deal with it, even though I know a number of intelligent people who aren't fussed by it at all. Chacun à son goût.)

As Bear often points out, there is no one method that works for everyone: you have to go with whatever gets you to sit in the damn chair and write. Spew-drafts work for a lot of people, many of them far more successful than I, but for me, they're pretty much the equivalent of riding an exercise bike with a too-low setting: they take up too much time for too little reward.

Which makes it an interesting challenge, working with someone else's rough draft. I tend to be impatient with other poets who try to do this with me, because I don't see it as the best use of my time: I don't want to be distracted with things the writer already recognizes as wrong and knows how to fix; for me, the primary usefulness of a beta is to point out the things the writer doesn't realize aren't quite right; to help the writer grope his/her way towards solving the things s/he does realize are off but can't suss out how to resolve; and to catch the typos the writer's missed because they've gone over the same pages too many times. But many people -- perhaps the majority -- don't share this expectation, because it's concept first and cleanup later for them. This in no way means their methods/expectations are wrong, but it does explain why some critique arrangements work out significantly better for me than others. (Though I will add that, over the years, the biggest problem by far has been people flaking out on reciprocation. I don't automatically crit with strings attached, but if the arrangement was proposed as an exchange, I will get annoyed if you fail to grant my work the attention I gave to yours.) I've done best with writers whose egos are as strong as mine and who are as no-holds-barred about getting every last punctuation mark right.

So, fearing I'd gotten too micro with what should've been a macro-crit prompted part of this, but reading Justine Larbalestier's post on rewriting is what pushed it into becoming this morning's morning pages [1], as it were. And now it's time to finish breakfast and get to work.


[1] Not actually a habit of mine, but sometimes pre-work blogging like this ends up performing the same function.

[Partially x-posted to my personal journal.]

At the moment, I am tired of fandom being characterized as weird, maniacal, and crazy, both among our own and in the larger world. Aside from the fact that fandom is not and has never been a monolithic entity, I just don't believe spending time on derivative stories and/or art is any weirder or inappropriate than mainstream society's collective devotion to watching a bunch of males in unflattering clothing beating up on each other or whaling on plastic projectiles. Both sets of activities induce pleasure, pain, glee, and wild surges of hope and adrenalin among fans, and they bore, baffle, and/or trigger resentment in those who are not.

I enjoy sports myself. I lettered in track and cross-country in high school, I had a season pass to Michigan Stadium during graduate school, and when the Bulls won their first championship, I saw it on tv as it happened and then stayed up watching my fellow Chicagoans literally dancing for joy in the parking lot across from my apartment.

That said, you'll never hear me claim that being a White Sox fan is a hobby for the rational (and I'm married to a man who roots for the Yankees. The WOE!). I'm also coming to believe that making kids practice in full pads in this weather ought to rate as some form of abuse. [Another Southerner and I were talking about one team local to him a couple of weeks ago, and he said, "And the thing is, they're not even that good." On the saner end of the spectrum, some of the schools in one of the counties next to mine are delaying tonight's games by thirty minutes to wait out the heat.] As far as I'm concerned, if someone wants to pontificate about fandom's objectification of imaginary minors, I'm going to have trouble taking them seriously unless they can tell me how their principles apply to athletic prodigies -- say, for instance, gymnasts -- and other child performers (and if the argument falls back on artistic/inspirational merit, well, that's an age-old impasse, isn't it).

And, as many of you know, I don't even write about underage characters 98% of the time. And there are Kentucky fans who don't paint their faces blue on a routine basis or shoot out newspaper boxes when the team gets sanctioned. Even so, I do have some fondness for the, er, more expressive participants in both HP and sports fandom -- I mean, yeah, sometimes they're rude or mean or gross or shrill, but they're also often hilarious and inventive and wildly entertaining. But when they're written or spoken of as representative of all of us? It makes me annoyed and tired. Not because I'm saner or morally superior to them, but because they aren't me, and I never did particularly take well to being ignored. If people are going to generalize about fandom, I want them to include or at least acknowledge my kind in their considerations.

Naturally, I'd prefer that people refrain from generalizing altogether, but that would truly be veering into realms of unreality (not to mention hurling stones from my glass cave), and this is already longer than I meant for it to be. :-/

[/cantankerous]