graculus

Yes, I survived Christmas, the space between Christmas and New Year, and have now made it into 2018. Happy New Year to everyone (if there's still anyone out there, anyway?) and here's hoping 2018 treats you kindly.

My plans for the year are pretty simple at the moment - finish the course I'm doing, carry on working, take some épée lessons in the hope of getting through the first round of a competition at some point, get to the gym at least once a week, get out walking at least once a month, finish off the long-standing fic WiP. In the summer, I'm signed up to do a boat-based whale and dolphin survey with the Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust, which I'm looking forward to very much indeed! Then, in August, I'm planning to go to Nine Worlds again, after missing it last year because I was in Finland for WorldCon.

Back in December the weasels were spayed and seem absolutely fine afterwards, even though they still have nice rectangular bald patches on their bellies which meant no frolicking in the snow, just in case. Their winter coats are really good otherwise and one of them also has a lot more dark hair, which means I can tell them apart now (this was a problem when I first got them). They are also much less bitey, good manners cost nothing! ;)

We've had two weeks off fencing over the holiday period and I really missed it, just like last year. I got to play with all the electric weapons last weekend, as we were doing the kit audit and needed to check everything, but it wasn't the same as actually stabbing someone. We start back on Thursday, with my next competition in about a month, so I need to get into the habit of actually asking for one-on-one lessons - they're not a problem, I've just not asked before.

Anyway, onwards into 2018! Alas, I have an assignment to finish for next Monday, as well as schemes of work to review, so must stop binge-watching TV shows and actually get on with something...

What is it about a piece of media that grabs me and makes me want to interact with it in any way? I've been thinking about this quite a lot because there's not really been anything new that's made me want to write, at least since the Man from UNCLE movie and you could possibly argue that was just an extension of an older interest, though the movie versions of the characters and the TV show versions were also different enough to argue the exact opposite!

Anyway, for me there are various levels where source material is concerned:

Level 0 - I have no interest in interacting with it, despite (or sometimes because of, I'm looking at you Firefly fandom) other people's views on it

Level 1 - I read/watch the source material and have no interest in further accounts of the characters

Level 2 - I read/watch the source material and read fanfic

Level 2a - the source material carries on but I stop reading/watching at a certain point and carry on reading (at least some of) the fanfic

Level 3 - I read/watch the source material and both read fanfic and write it myself

I'm a bit of a completist so I tend not to want to write about something till I'm sure I have a real grasp on everything about it, so that's not really a good marker for live source material, which is probably why I've more recently been writing stuff from closed canon. I'm not sure I could cope with the level of assholery often shown by showrunners any more - it was bad enough first time around and few of them seem to have learned anything from their own and other's mistakes.

The problem is, that even if I were inclined to start writing for a new live fandom, there really doesn't seem to be anything out there that I actually find engaging enough to kick me up to Level 3. There's plenty of stuff which has made me get to Level 2 but no further - for example, I love the Peter Grant books and really like reading the fic but have zero interest in trying to write my own.

There are no stories out there for me in that material. Where Level 3 is concerned, some of it is 'I've got this great idea and other people would mess it up if they wrote it, so I need to write it' - thoughts of 'I could do better' were certainly how I got started writing in the first place, even though I subsequently discovered it wasn't as easy as it looked! I wonder if also I am less inclined to have those stories if I see other people producing them and doing it well? Though that wouldn't explain wanting to write UNCLE, which always had a plethora of quality fic I enjoyed reading.

So, what makes a set of source material move from one level to the next? Well, for starters there needs to be a set of characters who I am interested in and want to get to know - usually if I find them aesthetically pleasing that also helps immensely, though that's not sufficient in itself. For example, I've been watching Legends of Tomorrow because of a couple of characters and despite a couple of others: I immediately wanted more of Sara Lance and also liked the whole Snart & Rory dynamic (I've always had a bit of a thing for bad people trying to do good things despite their nature). Sadly, there are also a couple of characters on the show who are interchangeable bland generic white bread hetero males, one recently introduced because of [something spoilery] because there weren't enough on the show already I guess?

There also needs to be some chemistry between the characters I like and of course, as with anything subjective, YMMV whether particular characters have that special something going on or not. That's probably part 2 of the previous point, really, since it goes hand-in-hand with the 'characters I'm interested in' aspect. I can be interested in the character but if there's no spark, then nada in terms of moving on to even Level 2. It doesn't have to be romantic or sexual, just something that tells me character A gives a damn about character B and then hello 50k word angst fest as character A is kidnapped and loses their memory and character B has to rescue them. Or something else, possibly involving naked sexy times but I can live without that.

The one I still don't quite get is that step between Level 2 and Level 3, whatever constitutes the tipping point between reading and writing. For example, I've been reading lots of stuff set in the MCU (including a shedload of Sam/Steve, Steve/Bucky and Sam/Steve/Bucky but other stuff too) and still have zero stories for it myself. Nothing, nada, zilch. Even though I've read stuff that was so relentlessly mediocre it made my eyes water, so it's not the 'I could do better' aspect, that's for certain!

If anyone has any ideas, please let me know!

As we rapidly head towards the Easter break, I am looking forward to trying to get ahead of the game in terms of course preparation for the two classes I'm teaching - I'd already got a lot of material I could use since I'd taught stuff at a similar level in the last academic year but (of course) no two courses are completely alike. I've also had to adjust what I'm doing for one class because it's being taught alongside functional maths and ICT classes, which means teaching the kind of vocabulary that you need to be able to follow instructions around those subjects and also talk about what you're doing. So that's a bit of a work in progress!

In theory, there's a bit of an overlap in terms of ability between my two courses but the extremes at both ends drag things out of a nice sensible shape. At one end I've got a chap who says he's bored because he knows everything I'm teaching - though when I get him to do stuff in class, that's not always borne out by his work, so I'm taking that with a big pinch of salt - and at the other end I've got folks who sit and look at me like rabbits in the headlights. So there's a lot of repetition in that class. A lot of repetition. *sigh*

Anyway, at least I've started getting paid again, that's the main thing - the outstanding wages from the university turned up, I got paid for the hours I taught in January and I'm looking forward to wrestling with the tax office soon about the money I've given them which I'll be having back. Unfortunately for them, I keep meticulous records of all my incomings (good thing too, since I got paid by three different employers last year) so it's not as much of a chore as it could be.

In other news, my aged computer finally fell over and breathed its last, just refusing to boot up at all. Considering it had gone through various bits being replaced over its lifespan, not to mention outliving the company that made it by a matter of 7 years, I decided that enough was enough. So now I have a refurbished Windows 7 computer that cost me less than a night in a London budget hotel and so far, so good.

Speaking of London hotels (see, what a neat segue!) I'm still currently undecided about what to do about Nine Worlds this year. I enjoyed last year's convention, mostly because of getting to hang out with folks, since a lot of the fandom panels in particular were quite basic in nature. And this year, after a bunch of understandable complaints regarding the hotel it's moved to, of all places, Hammersmith. Very convenient for the folks running it who I assume mostly live in London but a little more difficult for the rest of us who weren't able to get a hotel room in the hour that the discount rate rooms were on sale.

Being in the hotel itself makes a big difference to the experience (in my opinion), both in terms of being able to disappear off for a bit of peace and quiet if needed and also not having to worry about carrying everything you're going to need for the day. A list of back-up hotels has gone round but I've yet to organise anything, so who knows if any of those other places even still have space? I was also underwhelmed by the concept of having to phone to book stuff, because phones... bleurgh. So I may or may not be going, I really don't know right now.

If nothing else, I will be going to Helsinki next year. I'm already starting to look at what else I'll be doing while I'm there, though sadly I think I'm missing the main season for spotting flying squirrels!

A lot has changed since I got into fandom, back in the late 1990's. That was also when I first got online and it was dial-up, which seems like another world completely - I regularly ended up paying extra at the end of the month because I'd exceeded my allotted time online.

At one point we were downloading episodes of SG-1 in what everyone referred to as 'squinty-vision' because the resulting files were huge (in relative terms) but the video produced was tiny and so you'd have to squint to figure out what was going on or even to tell non-speaking characters apart sometimes (the joys of a series that takes place mostly in a setting where people wear uniforms, I guess!). Those files still used to take literally hours to download, so I used to set them up before I went to bed and hope the download wouldn't crash overnight.

And then there were the mailing lists, long before the advent of LJ, and their own particular way of doing things. Some fandoms still have them and they're ticking over, but most of them have (understandably) gone the way of the dinosaur when LJ became the main place for fandom to be.

Now, bypassing the rise and fall of LJ, a lot of fandom is on Tumblr, which is by no means the right place for anything other than lots of 'ooh shiny' given the way it does things. And there's definitely a place for shallow and pretty, but that doesn't mean it works for anything else. So it's quite amusing (in a sad head-shaking and remembering we've been through this before) that some folks now on there are all 'oh, Tumblr is changing and fandom should leave'. This started last year, iirc, when Tumblr was bought by Yahoo and people starting having minor freak-outs. Yes, you should leave and come back to LJ and/or Dreamwidth where we can have proper discussions about things without horrible nesting issues.

I wonder where we'll end up next? ;)



Meanwhile, in related news, I'm happy to say that I'm managing to write at least 750 words every day and am currently on a 16 day streak. After a very scientific method of tossing a coin on August 31st, I also signed up for the month challenge on 750 Words, which gets me another badge and my name on the Wall of Awesomeness if I manage it. I am apparently much more easily motivated (in this case by small internet pics of animals and birds) than I ever imagined would be the case!

Now, after months of my subconscious going 'pfft, call yourself a writer, you can't even manage to sit down and do anything!', we've now moved onto 'oh, so maybe you can write everyday, but what you're writing is shit' which I guess is an improvement? Yep, just over 15,000 words and maybe some of it is crap, but at least it exists.

Been posting on the new UNCLE kink meme which is a bit of an odd experience, all this anonymity and so on - boy, there are some really 'interesting' prompts on there! And yes, I'm writing movie fic but plan to use the same method to break the deadlock on my two existing public WIP as well as clear out some of the other stuff I've had lurking on my hard drive, some of it literally for years.

( The fandom meme )

Day 27 - Best pilot episode

A solid pilot episode is a must for me - if I can't even make it through that, then I'm never going to watch the show. I think I'm going to have to go with Person of Interest for this, with honourable mentions for White Collar and Life - it does a really nice job of setting up the characters of Reece and Finch, as well as their relationship, while teasing for some of the things we now know about them and the world they inhabit.


In other news, I had a trip out earlier this week for what was supposed to be a job interview but was more an informal guided tour of a possible workplace, leaving me really uncertain about whether or not I'd hit the right note with the guys I saw. However, I just got a call from the agency who were arranging this to say that I've been made an offer and so I should be starting work mid-October!

Basically, it's student wrangling in one of the libraries of a local university - the money's not great and the hours are crazy, but it's a foot in the door if I decide I want to go into this line of work in general as I need practical experience for the MA I've been looking at. It's also experience for applying for similar jobs with better pay and less crazy hours, so we'll see how things work out as we go along.

Meanwhile, I've also started that preparatory adult teaching course (which is 14 weeks) and there may be the possibility of some work via someone I met there too. Because it's shift work, we'll see how knackered the odd hours leave me and go on from there...


In other, other news, I've also just purchased my ticket for Loncon next August, so I'm sure I shall see some folks from my flist there - this year is the first since the very early years of me being in fandom proper that I haven't been to a con and I don't like it. How could I miss going to an actual WorldCon when one's so close(ish) to home? Meanwhile, regardless of that, this con will be made possible by a substantial and extremely unexpected cheque from my former employer, who apparently has to pay me for the annual leave I didn't get to take... ;)

*points to title of this post* Though I'm not certain it's really a Bank Holiday as the sun is shining...

Been back just over a week from my trip to the Outer Hebrides but still haven't quite got my bearings yet or indeed unpacked completely. It was an odd trip, mostly because I'm not that used to staying in B&B - hotels have been much more my thing and it's quite a different approach, particularly for the anti-social amongst us (me, in other words). The only downside about travelling on your own - which is otherwise great, because you get to do exactly what you like, no need for negotiation or compromise - is that you get to listen to the inanity of other people without any kind of buffer.

The Hebrides themselves are extremely beautiful. I have hundreds of pics I need to sort through and that was despite the fact there were a couple of days where the weather limited what I could do. The way of life is like stepping back in time - the resident population of the entire archipelago is only about 28,000 and even when you add tourists (considering I was there at the start of their tourist season) it's never going to be that busy. Most of the time, wherever I was, I had the place to myself. The top half of the islands, everything is closed on Sundays and even outside there, most shops close at 6 and restaurants don't serve food after 9.

There were lots of people cycling the islands (which seemed like quite a masochistic pursuit to me - they're not that hilly, but the weather is very changeable and the wind can be evil) - not to mention the hordes of folks with campervans. This is a place where the majority of the roads are single track with passing places, which takes a little getting used to, as does the cavalier attitude of the livestock to the concept of vehicles. I'm used to sheep, though the Hebrides sheep are much more cocky than any I've encountered before - I'd been told that sometimes you have to 'nudge' them with the car to get them to move, but fortunately I didn't meet any that were quite that recalcitrant - and then there's the Vatersay cows. Yes, the cows on that particular island are notorious for their liking to lie down in the road, not to mention apparently making a special detour to it when it comes time to defecate, since there seemed to be more cowpats on the road than in the surrounding fields.

I'd hoped to get the chance to do some kayaking while I was up there, but sadly it was a little too early in the season, so if there's anything that gets me back there then it'll probably be that as much as anything else. That and just how relaxed the place is, if you get into the swing of things there, not to mention the fact that while it's supposed to be one of the best places in the UK to see otters I didn't manage to spot a single one. :(

In other news, before I went away I've been doing some work on the house and garden, discovering yet more joys of BIY (bodge it yourself) from the previous owner. This is a guy who thought it was a really good idea to just plaster in water pipes running along an outside wall without insulating them first, so that when the inevitable burst pipe happened one winter I ended up with a massive mess before I could get the burst fixed. Those pipes have now been boxed in instead, in case of future calamity.

He'd also built a raised bed in the garden which was falling apart, so this year I decided to pull it to bits and replace it. Digging down, I discovered that he had pulled up a bunch of paving slabs underneath it (fair enough) but had then just thrown the resulting rubble into the raised bed with the earth. I now have a nice pile of broken slabs to dispose of, but I do have a proper raised bed in which I am attempting to grow vegetables. At present, pumpkins (which are finally coming up even though I planted them before I left for Scotland, delayed by the poor weather), garlic and beans.

I had all sorts of plans for catching up with various shows and writing too while I was away, none of which really amounted to anything, though I did read a lot of fic. When it came to updating the recs pages on my website, I discovered all sorts of issues with them which led to a complete overhaul and this led to a general sort-out over there. All sorts of things were on AO3 that weren't on my site and vice versa, though the latter is mostly stuff I can't quite bring myself to re-read (SG-1 fic, I know your ears are burning...) and I'm not sure if it should be more widely shared. Or if there are even still people reading that fandom, fcol. ;)

Also I have written a thing, (a Magnificent 7 fic) which makes me hope that I can continue to make some progress on the other stuff I need to finish.

Okay, I think that's sufficient rambling for now...

Where to begin other than 'still not dead'? *sigh*

I can't believe we're already 12 days into August with no significant progress in terms of anything except the ongoing cleanliness of my house (thanks to UFYH, if anyone hasn't come across it yet) and that's pretty much it. Part of this was to accommodate the lovely obelix coming to stay/go to Connotations, then I found out a couple of weeks ago that she's not able to, which was a massive disappointment. *shakes fists at obelix's unreasonable employer*

Have been reading lots (both fic and otherwise), as well as working my way through various tv shows, including my current favourite Person of Interest - I was considering pimping this at Connotations however when I started wondering just how I'd do that in a meaningful way without spoiling it massively, my brain ground to a halt. Meanwhile, I suffer from a dearth of good fic in that fandom (in other words, fic where the characters actually sound like themselves at all rather than over-excitable hipsters, since both our protagonists are pretty taciturn in the show itself) and pondering over the stories with John Reese being a shapeshifter who can turn into a snake. No, I have no idea either unless it's all about snakes having two penises.

I've also had to move my website, after I got notified that BT are shortly not going to be offering free webhosting any more - if anyone's interested, the new site is here on hosting I already had to upload photos, though I still need to get my fic updated there since there's a bunch of things on AO3 that aren't on my own site. However, I was getting way more traffic to my recs pages than I was to my fic, so I've just put redirects on those pages just in case.

Work continues to be significant amounts of rampant stupidity, one way or another. Whether it's a pissing contest with a manager elsewhere (who then ran off to whine to my managers when he didn't get what he wanted from me, without telling me he was going to do that - twice now and it's really hacking me off) or just general idiocy, I think I need a holiday. So I'm currently looking at where I can go over New Year, possibly India since I don't really want anywhere that isn't warm.

Okay, think that'll do as an update for a few weeks... ;)

Because, damn it, that last post has depressed the hell out of me...

I think I've found my fandom to pimp at connotations this year. :)

Also, the deadline is rapidly approaching for the smallfandombang, for which I'm writing dystopian!AU Wild Wild West. It's currently standing at about 12,000 words and I'm pretty happy with it so far - not really sure how many more words I'm going to need to finish it but it's got to be done by the end of the month.

Thirdly, one of my new favourite shows (though don't spoil me, as I haven't seen the entire season yet) got a second season - yes, Grimm got picked up again! I have a bunch of other stuff to watch over the summer too, as I think the only shows I'm actually up to date with are Community and The Big Bang Theory. Everything else is stacking up on the external hard drive for the summer when the telly is crap, though at least I also have season 2 of Suits to look forward to!

In non-fannish news, I have recently started following Unfuck Your Habitat, which is well worth a look if you're like me and tend to drop things and leave them. My house is a hell of a lot tidier than it's been for ages and the whole 20/10 and 45/15 method also works for writing, I've discovered - hence adding 4,000 words in one day to my WWW fic.

Hell, yeah it's October and I just woke up after getting back from connotations yesterday, not that I went to bed immediately on getting home from dropping off katemonkey and gumbie_cat (who I know were planning a MLP marathon on the Wii because they started talking about it as we turned into katemonkey's street, so mock them as they so richly deserve!) but you know what I mean...

Booked the week off because a) I knew it would be A Very Good Idea after the con (awesome as always, guys!) but also b) because I have Stuff To Do which I never seem to get done at the weekends. Like I broke my bed a few weeks back, though sadly not in a fun sexytiems way, and it needs replacing and I can't even begin to consider going to Ikea except during the week. Also nobody told me that being a grown-up would involve taking stuff to the tip recycling centre and having to be Responsible and stuff like that. Or if they did, I ignored it in favour of 'but you can spend all day in your jammies and nobody will give you shit about it!'.

Back to the con, I somehow ended up modding/co-modding two panels, which went way better than my half-arsed preparation could have possibly allowed me to hope - for those who weren't there, they were on 'Kink meme culture - creative wellspring or inspirational cul-de-sac' (or it may have been the other way around...) and 'What, if anything, has fandom learned from various fails or does it just make us more prone to navel-gazing?' At some point this week there will be summaries of the main points and links to stuff on connotations, though I have to say after someone at the Crack Fic panel talked about the Merlin/Arthur AU where Arthur is a BNF in Camelot fandom and there was also discussion about the various Charles/Erik fic where one or other of them is a kitten, how is it that all of those ended up being recced on epic_recs the past few days? Fandom Hive Mind, we haz it. And there was also (finally, after many years of threatening to do so) pimping of Wild Wild West and it was good. :)

In short, it was once again good to be Among My People and I am already looking forward to next year, though my brain still refuses to accept that this will be Connotations X - yes, the con is 10 next year! *wibbles*

In other news, work continues to be just like working for local government, but with more chocolate and biscuits. Buzz the psycho loner ferret has now decided his latest trick will be to go blind in both eyes, which means he has a tendency to run into things since his only paces are either complete stop or full-out run. And there must and will be fic. Along with consideration of whether I want to attempt Nano this year, which will depend on whether I can storyboard the idea (in the movie version of which, in my mind at least, the male protagonists are currently played by Takeshi Kaneshiro and Paul Bettany, no I have no idea how that happened either...) I have and convince myself I can get a novel out of it, which I probably can if I put my mind to it.

Thoughts? Comments? Brickbats? I could probably do with more of all of those, except maybe the latter. ;)

3 – For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favourite characters to write?

Stargate SG-1 - I've always been a Daniel Jackson fan, from the movie, so it won't come as a surprise to anyone if I say how much I enjoy writing Daniel, but as time has gone on I've also very much enjoyed trying to get my head around how to write Teal'c without him taking on the role he does in many of the episodes (standard line of dialogue - "Indeed.").

Man from UNCLE - I've told so many people by now how Illya Kuryakin was my first crush when I was too young to know what the hell was going on, and as time has gone on I've come to appreciate the devious and sarcastic person inside the lovely packaging. So he's my absolute favourite to write, as a result. However I've also grown to appreciate Napoleon Solo more, as I've grown up myself, and see more depth in him than a cursory Illya-focussed watching of the show allowed, so I find I also enjoy writing him as well.

Magnificent Seven - I wish I could say that it's a close contest between Ezra Standish and other characters, but that would be a terrible lie. I can't imagine writing Mag7 without Ezra as the focus of the story and I particularly like the chance it gives to stretch my vocabulary writing dialogue. ;)

Wild Wild West - I love Artemus Gordon but then I find that I also very much enjoy writing Dr Loveless, because his particular variety of (mostly Jim-obsessed in some way) crazypants is just so much fun!