Café Ennui

So without thinking about it too deeply I signed up for this year's sgabigbang. I signed up partly because it seemed like a good idea at the time, but mostly because it's slated to be the last year of the challenge so I won't get another chance.

I had several ideas, but they all either felt too much like short(er) stories (I don't want to end up with 10,000 words of story and 30,000 words of padding) or too big for me to manage in the time available. Except for one ... so I'm going with that and I'm trying not to worrying about how nebulous it feels at the moment.

If I finish it'll be the longest story I've ever written by 25k or so words and the only thing preventing me from railing at myself for not sticking with the lurking a little more rigidly, is the fact that I'm too busy trying to work my idea into a story and decide whether or not it's going to be an AU.

I have a spreadsheet and currently I'm using it to help me keep track of stuff and build scenes. So far it's actually quite a lot of fun.

I have just one (fandom) squick, but it comes in various subtly different guises. That squick is embarrassment and one of it's many guises is Fans Made Them Do It.

Oddly I came to SGA through said squick. I become peripherally interest in the fandom when David Hewlett first set up his web site and fans started squeeing about his awesome fan friendliness and, well, his awesomeness in general. This squeeing about his awesomeness was largely centered around the way he dealt with fans who thought that it was fun and appropriate to share sexually explicit manips of him in his forum. I'd never before heard of Stargate Atlantis or David Hewlett but my embarrassment squick kicked in hard and I distracted myself by being impressed with David Hewlett.

I suppose without that Fans Made Them Do It incident I might never have discovered and developed a love for SGA and its fandom and would thus have been living without this hugely fun diversion, but I still wish fans wouldn't commit those kinds of faux pas. I wish they wouldn't do it even though without fans sometimes getting carried away and committing such horrifying faux pas we wouldn't have Michael Shanks's hilarious take on it. I wish I had time to track down a YouTube vid of him talking about it.

Speaking of YouTube vids and fan faux pas and getting to the thing which prompted this post and my remembrance of things past, there was a vid linked on mckay_sheppard this week which featured fans at Shore Leave putting DH on the spot and getting him to say "I love you John Sheppard". This was all meant in fun, of course, and I think the fans who put him on the spot probably wouldn't have done the same thing with a less fan-friendly and less accommodating actor, but, still, I found it extremely squicky. Eww.

I enjoyed reading this article earlier this week. Cory Doctorow says a lot that I've said and thought about fan fiction over the years. Writers emulate and copy 'the greats' much the way painters and sculptors did (and do), though that doesn't mean that moving into greater originality or professional writing is for everyone. And that it's 'active reading'? ... So true!

Some of the comments are as annoying as annoying things, though.

I discovered online fandom in 1999 and after a brief, heady period of gluttony in which I attempted to read every ST ff ever written and posted online (difficult because much of it had been purged from Tripod), I settled into Yahoo Groups with HP and few other fandoms. At first I was quite active, reviewing, recing, discussing, beta reading and even, just occasionally, writing ff, but then came greater off-line responsibilities and I made a few adjustments, adopted a new on-line identity --one less obviously associated with my off-line one-- put my virtual feet up and retired into a quiet life of lurking.