Chatty and yet feeling kind of meh

[cleolinda]

Hey, I feel talky, so let's get this out of the way before it gets crushed under the weight of the linkspam:

I don't know if I'm still manic or hypomanic, but I have somehow found a way to feel tired and wired at the same time--too edgy to sleep but too disgusted with life meh to do anything useful. It's funny--I'm having a lot of tiny moodswings. As in, my mood changes a lot, but the moods themselves aren't very "big," as it were. I mean, I'm not flailing around like Midnight Sun Edward Cullen or anything. It's just that in the course of an hour, it'll be like, "I'm tired and I don't want to do anything. Hey, I think I'll play around on my wiki! Let's check email. I kind of feel like crying, but eh, I think I'm just being hormonal. Let's desk dance a little. I want to work, I feel like working. Nooooo, I'm so sick of footnotes. My stomach hurts. GOD I HATE EVERYONE, PEOPLE MAKE ME SO TIRED." Of course, if y'all have heard my voice on the podcasts, you have to imagine all of that being said in a fairly even, deadpan tone. If this is mania, it's not impressing me. Which is probably for the best.

I mean, maybe this is totally normal. But once you know that you have a mood disorder, you start assuming that everything you feel is abnormal.

Oh, by the way, this journal's going to be five years old on Halloween! Whee! What I'm thinking about is something like what John Scalzi's doing for the tenth anniversary of his blog--link to an older entry each day, particularly since a lot of new people have started reading over the summer (*waves*). Yes, entries about my mother (Gerald, Sonic, all of that) will be represented. If there's anything else you really liked, let me know, because there are 2,436 entries prior to this one, according to my user info, and most of them aren't tagged (*sob*). And now you know why I have the Cleoland wiki--as a way of making some kind of organizational sense out of this thing. I'm going to try and improve it a good bit over the month--when I need fun breaks--so that the major topic pages are filled in.

(Another reason I have the wiki is because I need it as a reference to link to--and I need those links because I can't assume everyone's read everything or remembers what they did read. It saves people the trouble of asking, "Wait, what was that about again? Did I miss that?" Like the link to the podcasts up there, actually--that's exactly what that is. It's also why I tend to repeat myself and re-explain things, like The Inevitable Recap of My Depressive Episodes whenever I mention a minor medication change: because I can't assume you remember what I'm talking about. Anyway, in case that ever annoyed you, that's why I do it.)

Meanwhile, a post about fanfic from a fanfic writer who attended Clarion: "This is not a 'published fiction is better than fanfiction' post. It's a 'published fiction is harder than fanfiction' post." A really interesting read, in no small part because it better articulates something I was trying to get at, very generally, here:

So when you remove fandom from the equation, you're removing exactly what people came to fandom for in the first place: the characters and the worlds. You've got to create your own. And maybe writing in someone else's world has been like training wheels, maybe it's shown you the kind of thing you're going to need to do for yourself. Without having actually written narrative fanfiction, I still look at what JK Rowling's said about her process in terms of planning out a long series. What do you give away, how soon do you give it away--her decision to move Horcrux info from Chamber of Secrets to a later book, that kind of thing. But you're also in danger of having steeped in someone else's world for so long that you write your own thing, and it's like everything everyone's already seen.

Compare that bit of rambling to

Fanfiction is about taking an existing world and existing characters and, importantly, an existing audience, and writing something that appeals to that audience by expounding on a relationship or event or character within the original canon, sometimes even subverting the original canon. But even if you hold up an Alice in Wonderland mirror to the canon and write something gloriously fucked-up and twisty that would make the original canon writer spin in his grave, you are still writing with the aid of a mirror and, let me be blunt, it is a crutch.

Because you never have to start it from scratch. You never have to go "okay, goddammit, I need a believable character" because there's already a stable full of characters you love there to tinker with and explore; you don't usually have to research to create an economy/religion/political system from the ground up; in most (I stress most!) cases you don't have to build a coherent plotline beyond one or two scenes, especially if you are simply going into greater character depth with a canon plot event; et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Perhaps the hardest of these is that you don't have to figure out What the Story is About, which is what I mean when I say "stories that matter."

Like I said: she says it better.

Comments

[laurelin-kit.livejournal.com]

Oh my God! I missed my journal's five-yeariversary! Noo! It was back in May!

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Aww! I think I missed my journal's birthday last year or the year before.

[laurelin-kit.livejournal.com]

Mine is May 26, 2003. Halloween is a better date to remember.

Heh, you have about 500 more entries than I do. Despite the fact that I remember in the first two months of journaling I made multiple entries about watching a movie, during the movie. One movie.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I feel like all 500 of those entries happened in the last four months...

[morganwolf.livejournal.com]

I mean, maybe this is totally normal. But once you know that you have a mood disorder, you start assuming that everything you feel is abnormal.

Oh boy, do you ever. I'm feeling very much the same lately; I spent some time in my own journal today talking about it. It may be because I'm premenstrual, or because I haven't had a therapist for four months, or just the change of seasons. *shrug* Whatever it is, it's annoying, and I want to make it go away. I have things to do. I definitely relate, though, since on one hand being diagnosed with depression accounted for a lot, but on the other it can be hard to decide whether I'm in a depressive funk or just having a lousy week.

[phrenolepsy.livejournal.com]

Both are very true. I get so annoyed (and disappointed in myself) when I find "my" ideas in other fictional work and characters. I see these things I thought were so unique reflected in things I'd previously read or heard about, and not in that nice allegorical way, and I wonder about my ability to be original. So far I've figured that all I can do is keep reworking the characters and ideas, and hope they can stand on their own in time.

[laurelin-kit.livejournal.com]

Of course, I could have been caught up if I hadn't been in the hospital, I suppose.

[foresthouse.livejournal.com]

Just take a break, take a nap, and read for awhile or something. :) Maybe setting aside a couple of hours where you really don't have to do anything will be relaxing.

It's so true about fanfic vs. real fic. I will say, one reason it's kind of fun to write comics fanfic-type stuff (which is *sort of* what ask_deadpool is) is that comics as a medium has such shifting sands when it comes to writers and artists and such longevity when it comes to characters (they almost never die, so the stories are expected to keep on going) that it's less like taking ONE person's "world" and trying to "make it your own" or fit little different bits in without plagiarizing than it is like taking an ongoing story and writing new plots, etc.

The only time I ever tried non-comics fanfic was a very short HP scene done as an experiment to see how challenging it is to write when you already have the world-map laid out for you (http://foresthouse.livejournal.com/448663.html). My conclusion: the hardest part is trying to stick to canon.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, it's one of the reasons I've tried to keep from reading anything modern/current in the genre I'm writing about--in hopes that the story and characters will develop on their own without me getting into this mindset of, you know, "This is what writers always do, these are the lines you have to follow if you're going to write this genre." So far it seems to have worked out fairly well, although I'm also assuming that someone, somewhere, has already written similar stuff. It's just that I don't care now.

[viorica8957.livejournal.com]

What about writers who build on existing legends? Like, say, Marion Zimmer Bradley or Donna Jo Napoli. They base their stories on existing legends, but the characters are pretty much their own creations with familiar names stamped on, they can (and have) changed plotlines, motivations, settings, etc. Is that still considered fanfiction?

[discogravy.livejournal.com]

And now you have a new goal.

[silversyren.livejournal.com]

http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/343719.html !!

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, and the very act of writing fanfiction is, by definition, departing from canon. I mean, there's departing and there's departing, but yeah.

[lylassandra.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of what some Christian songwriter said about using Biblical lyrics-- it's like plagiarism that everyone applauds.

[elvensapphire.livejournal.com]

I have somehow found a way to feel tired and wired at the same time--too edgy to sleep but too disgusted with life meh to do anything useful. I've been feeling that way, too. I haven't been sleeping, in fact I've had these wretched insomniac episodes for the past couple of weeks, and yet I wake up and bounce around like a loon (if loons can bounce), and then I get sick, feel like I've been hit by a train, and then collapse into bed when it's still only seven at night. And then the cycle repeats. I don't know if it's mood swings, impending senility, or just lack of sleep. Suffice it to say, I understand what you're saying completely.

*wanders to the podcasts* I'm this sort of freak in that I remember voices. I might remember someone's voice before I remember someone's face because of the weird way my brain is wired. (Don't even talk to me about the way my mind records music. Sometimes it's painful.) Anyway, because of this, I always like to hear people's voices, especially LJ friends who I don't actually know, because then it adds more color to what they write. The type isn't just type anymore, it's the person's voice. Does that make any sense? Who knows what I'm even saying, I'm running on two hours of sleep and a mocha coffee.

Wow, I had no idea that both of your journals had gotten so huge. Is that slightly terrifying? It's weird to think about, but your journal was one of the very first ones I added. I created mine in January of 2004, and a friend pointed me to something you'd written (what it was, I don't recall), but I remember because I literally had no idea what I was even doing here on LJ, and at the time I was really shy about adding people and/or commenting because I was like, "omgz what if they hate me?!," but you were nice to me anyway. :) And now I'm an LJ addict and say completely insane things everywhere without caring what anyone thinks, and your journal remains one of my favorites to read. Because you sprinkle it with sparkle-motion and awesome sauce.

Halloween is a good anniversary to have! Werewolf-tested, vampire approved. ...And I'm so done talking now.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

You know, one of the things that changed my mind about fanfiction (I was originally very dismissive of it) was that I realized I could not logically argue that John Gardner's Grendel or Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, did not meet the definition of fanfic. There's a point where the threshold is basically "Is it still under copyright?" You can argue that there's a difference in "literary quality," except that quality is impossible to quantify and is totally subjective. So again, you're left with nothing but an arbitrary copyright boundary.

Which is not to say you can just make off with something if it's old enough to be in the public domain. Although I will say, the difference between fanfic and plagiarism, to me--and it's a huge one--is that fanfic depends on the reader knowing the source material, whereas the point of plagiarism is to hide the source and claim the credit yourself. Wide Sargasso Sea, for example, doesn't have much resonance if you haven't read Jane Eyre.

[foresthouse.livejournal.com]

Too true. I think what I meant was writing OOC fanfic vs. canon fanfic. I'm so not down with the fanfic terms. I can't get jiggy wit it. Get off my lawn, kids!!

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

*carefully sanitized pat*

[missmp.livejournal.com]

Oh man, that description of your mood swings had me cracking up, because that is exactly what I've been going through for the past couple of days. I think for me it's the shorter days, since I have SAD. Time to break out the sunlamp and drag my ass onto the exercise bike again!

re: The essay you linked. Of all nitpicky things, I take issue with her definition of "writer." I've never been published, but I've been making a living as a writer for five years now-- writing in fundraising, education, and travel. I write fiction too, but publishing is such a bitch of a business that I just don't want to ever have my rent money hinge on it. :-)

[venusad.livejournal.com]

....I'm not even sure when my lj was even started (sometime when I was in highschool, I know...)

I've never really felt comfortable writing fanfic. I don't like having to get into OTHER people's characters heads, because I don't feel like I can fully understand them. Also, there are rules in other universes (if you don't wany to be Smeyering Mary Suing it up all over the place.)
I hate rules other people make. It's confining, and if I want character a to do this, and character a cannot do that because character a never had that ability anyway...
Yeah. No fun.

But in writing original stories, it IS way harder. Word building is a pain, especially since I'm a person who just likes to write and write and figure it out as I go along. I don't think I'll ever be an abfab world builder, but I feel like if certain hacks we all know and remain insanely jealous of due to their sick luck and general lack of talent go their crap published....surely my head goblins should give it a go.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think someone in the comments does point out that she herself makes a living from writing without being concerned about writing professional fiction.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Well, see, that's why I've never written fanfic* at all. I'm too bossy. : )


* People refer to movie parodies as fanfic sometimes, which I think is selling fanfic itself a bit short--I think of "fanfiction" as literally that, a fictional narrative. I just write commentary.

By the way, according to your user profile, you started your journal on/at 2001-06-03 14:15:58. ; )

[laurelin-kit.livejournal.com]

OH GOD, THAT REMINDED ME. Today in Physics I spent the entire time watching this guy who sat in the row in front of me steadily chewing on his fingers the entire lecture. He touched his shoe, he put his hand back in his mouth and then he touched the chair arms. He attended to every single finger one after the other and I could actually see his fingertips glisten. For some reason through that whole thing all I could think of was Tiny Moist Hand.

[cleolinda.livejournal.com]

Hee!

Speaking of nasty people in class, can I gross you out? When I was in college, we had a Chick-fil-A on campus (or at least until I was a sophomore). So I'm in my math class and all through it this guy was eating from a box of chicken nuggets in the front pocket of his bookbag, and he was kind of gross in general, so I got a little queasy.

And then I remembered that the CFA didn't open until 10 am, and our class had started at nine.

[robinmc.livejournal.com]

But once you know that you have a mood disorder, you start assuming that everything you feel is abnormal.

I know exactly what you mean. I was diagnosed with depression in high school, and even though it's been close to ten years, and I've been off meds for about three years, there are still times when I think to myself "ok, this is how I feel, but I shouldn't be feeling this way...should I?"

And of course there are still times when I'm depressed about something legitimate (crawling into bed after doing my taxes last year comes to mind) and it scares the crap out of my family.

Thanks for posting the thing about fanfic. It was fascinating. Lots to ponder.