Subject: Re: [VP] Another new neighbor
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 19:20:55 -0700
From: "jat (Jane) "

On Wed, 21 Jun 2000 16:35:36 flamingoslim wrote:
<a message that I suppose you all are not seeing for the first time>
>And every apartment has the perfect view of the boys when
>they come home from work! ;-)
Sorta like that Coke ad. Windows full of women.
>...someone will show the new neighbor how
>to tune in to that special cable station you can only get at VenicePlace.
Cable? Really? How did I get this lucky? And I bet I can get phone calls while I'm online too, that will make my mother happy.
>If we're lucky, in a few days our new neighbor might feel
>comfortable enough to introduce herself.
Ah, well, we might as well get this clear right away. I have No Shame. See, that would be me sunbathing nude on the roof.
<big wave> Hi! Hi!!
>Settle in and have some fun. Welcome to the Nicest 'Hood on the Net.
Thanks. <putting feet up> Cable! Wow! Hey, cat, come out of the carrier and check
this out!
Jane

Subject: Re: [VP] Writing for Praise?
Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 09:52:43 -0700
From: "jat (Jane) "

I deal with a lot of bad writing myself, and what becomes obvious if the writers involved will talk freely is that *nobody* submits bad writing deep-down-knowing it to be bad.
My latest interaction with someone over this issue was a wretched conversation with a woman whose schooling has been very inadequate. Oh, yes, she knows that her grasp of Standard Edited American English is not very good, that she spells badly and has little sense of where punctuation marks go. She's *not* stupid, and few bad writers are. The percentage is bsically the same as in other areas of life, I'd venture. I play excrutiatingly bad baseball, myself--I am stupid at baseball--but I dare say that does not make me stupid overall.
Anyway, after several hours of work, which I witnessed, she had finally managed to write a paragraph about what she most admired about her sister. Yes, one paragraph. I think it went through four drafts, not a record in this class, but still more effort than I am sure she had put into writing for a long time. I graded it; that's my job. A week later we were having this awful talk about how her sister had loved it and couldn't I see how hard she'd worked and why had I marked it up and of course writing well is very important and she really valued high standards and she realized that she wasn't any good at this and she thought maybe she'd drop the class and she really valued this opportunity. Actually I didn't end up saying much myself: she was doing both sides of the conversation.
Just because somebody on a newsgroup doesn't tell you her life's story doesn't mean that it is not like this. And there are a lot of ways of saying "it hurts to take your
criticism seriously." And it is *legitimate* to write something about, say, your sister, show it to the sister, and be more influenced by what she says than by the words of a relative stranger.
I *love* good writing. And for myself, I want to honor the affection I have for the fandom and the characters, and live up to the best of the fiction I've read, by writing as well as I possibly can. As well as I know how to write, in all the ways I can understand. I suspect most fan writers feel that way, even when they don't say it, or can't articulate it, or don't know how to look for the things that bother me.
I can't say, honestly, "here's why I don't write poorly," because I honestly believe the issue can't be framed in that way. But here are the reasons I want most to write well, try hardest to do that:
1. Some very intense experiences, some life-changing feelings and thoughts, happened to me while I was reading. If I have any chance of doing that for someone else, I don't want to mess it up because I lost track of my modifiers and left them dangling around.
2. I love my own writing when it's good--it does cause me intense, itchy, squirmy embarrassment if I feel some part of the writing is not right. I want to avoid feeling that.
3. I love praise, but I get little pleasure from it unless I agree with it, rationally. If I don't feel the writing is good, nobody else can touch me with their appreciation of it.
4. I know how irritated I get when I see basically good writing or a moving idea or an intriguing plot twist obscured by errors that a good proofreader could catch, or a good beta-reader could ask the writer to revise (would he say that? Doesn't he seem to have three hands here?). I don't want to cause that reaction. I am too vain for it.
5. I'm ambitious. I want to live up to and even surpass the fiction that I've enjoyed so much myself.
So there's my list. It overlaps with yours a lot. If we tried we could make a master list, probably, that even your old newsgroup would agree with. It wouldn't prevent bad writing, of course; if only that were so easy.
Jane

Subject: Re: [VP] How did you get into slash?
Date: Mon, 07 Aug 2000 07:06:42 -0700
From: "jat (Jane) "

>In a message dated 8/6/00 12:05:32 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
>flamingoslim@delphi.com wrote:
>
>How did you get into slash, and how did you get into SH slash
> specifically?
I was a Star Trek fan. A rather timid one. So I never went to cons and hardly knew anybody else who liked it; read those rather icky Blish retellings and the *much* more icky _Spock Must Die_...that tells you when I was and how desperate. I bought books *about* Trek, and one of them talked about fandom enough to mention zines as a group and K/S as a genre. Huh, I thought. I'm not really one of those who saw slash in the show when I was nine years old, but it didn't come as a perceptible shock either. But I didn't know how to get hold of any of that stuff.

Then I went to an Modern Language Association conference, of all places--not sure of the year but I could look it up; it was in New Orleans. I had lunch with a friend who had gone to a queer studies panel--or maybe a pop culture panel because he knew there was a K/S paper being read. I *kick* myself for not going but there was a competing panel on something I was working on. Anyway Tomas didn't know the show well enough to follow the paper in much detail. Might have been Jenkins, I suppose. Tomas was particularly fascinated by the demographic of the writers as the paper described it--straight middle aged women--the same characterization I'd read about in the book though now I'd say it's a poor basis for theory. I was, actually, more interested in how to get my crawfish open.

I honestly don't remember how I started looking for Trek stuff on the net. I've been trying to think. I can remember the first site where I read stories but not the search that took me there. It was a slash site with links to Killa's Turning Point and a few Greywolf things and I was instantly hooked. Found alt.startrek.creative, tried my hand at a story, and someone wrote and said, try posting this on ASC-erotica.moderated, so I did. It was slash, by the way, a spinoff of "Amok Time."

What I'd already been telling my friends was that on average, the gen stories I read were not as well written as the slash erotica. I still don't really have any theory why that is so. It's not like there isn't plenty of extrememly well-written hetsmut or gen stuff in fanfic. Certainly not like there isn't *bad* slash fiction.

This whole thing, net fandom and fanfic and erotica and newsgroup/mailing list cultures and so forth, interests me quite apart from the terrific reading I've found and the supportive feedback I've gotten for some of my own writing. But I began to feel that I didn't know enough to understand it at all well (still don't) and the first step was trying to find other subcultures to see what was ASCEML-worldview and what was more generalizable. I'm sorry if I sound like an anthropologist: I'm not doing scholarship though I'd like to someday when I really have some good ideas. But this is genuinely how my mind works, I'm afraid. You wanted a coming-out story, Flamingo.

So I read around, looking. Had to be a show that I knew (yeah, I read Sentinel fic sometimes, and Highlander, and it's neat fiction but I can't say more than that, not being a watcher). Had to be fiction I liked (I didn't have much luck with Forever Knight, a show I'd liked when I could stay up long enough to watch it, but then the story arcs went on for more shows and I lost the thread, and the first several stories I read just didn't grab me). Had to be a culture I could feel comfortable in (tried a mailing list or so where nobody would talk to me or I didn't have anything to say--yeah, lurking is fine if you like it, but my natural inclination is to talk all the time). And I was looking, actually, for something outside science-fiction or fantasy circles.

The last time I actually remember seeing the show (before Lasha made me a tape) was in 1980. I think. We were in England on vacation and trying to find something to do while the jetlag was wearing off. I had wanted to see some *British* TV, thanks, but what we found was Dukes of Hazard, and I think Starsky and Hutch. Later we watched the Olympics in Dorking, a place name we couldn't say with straight faces for days. Someone we stayed with and with whom we didn't really get along turned the TV on either because she was desperate or because experience suggested that Americans were only happy watching their own TV, and we may have seen it then too, between episodes of Scruples, which none of us really liked but did have some camp value (Ringo! Yeah!).

Sorry, that was off-topic.

Anyway, I found Alexis Rogers' Starksy and Hutch fiction. (Never, friends, underestimate the value of being on lots of search engines. Alexis is everywhere.) I liked it. I remembered the show well enough to follow it. I looked in egroups, found ThePitsFic, and liked that too. Found Flamingo's archive and didn't come up for air or sleep for days. Yeah, poor Mamabird, you've probably gotten more Eclipse of the Heart feedback in this thread than you usually see for quite some time. I'm *telling* you, though, I *dreamed* about that story. When, later, I saw photos of the apartments (which I'd totally forgotten), I thought, yes, that would be where Hutch was standing when... you know, that sort of thing. When I saw Coffin for Starsky, which I'm pretty sure I never had before, my first thought was, oh *that*'s what that mirror looks like!

So actually that's why I've never written the LOC, dear bird--the story has gone down into my subconscious and *imprinted* me; I don't have anything detailed to say about it. Wow. That's all.

And this is probably much more than you wanted to know.

Jane