5 things for the internet

[melannen]

1. I have signed up for intoabar again! With Katharine Dunleavy from Jupiter Ascending and Snarkout Boys, The Librarians, Steven Universe, and Saga as my four possible fandoms. There is no possible way I will ever regret this.

2. I also did indeed sign up for Camp Nano for April. I will probably regret this. So far I mostly just want to make more lanyards.

3. First day of class went well! I think it will be fun and not as exhausting as I was afraid, mandatory group project aside.

4. Other than that I have been getting basically nothing done, as predicted. lalalala.

5. sathinfection posted a writing meme on Tumblr where you get to be your own worst critic. I kinda feel like on the one hand it would be good to actually get some of that out there and talk about it instead of being a secret shame? But on the other hand once you go down that rabbit hole it is hard to come back up. So here I will post it on DW for answering in comments instead of smearing it all over my tumblr dash:

If you want to see me do one of these, leave a number in a comment and I'll answer! If this feels too dangerous to you do not click the cut.

1: Go to your oldest work online and find the most cringe-inducing section.
2: What's the most embarrassing porn you've ever written?
3: Most embarrassing drawerfic.
4: Laziest ending.
5: Worst beginning.
6: Send me one of my own fics to flame.
7: Rank your top five worst fics.
8: How do you disagree with your AO3 stats page?
9: Send me one of my own fics and I'll write the worst comment imaginable for it.
10: Write a parody of your own style.

Comments

[omens]

OK those are awesome fandom choices!

Cabin Dinocrazy #fistbump

I would be intrigued to know about #3 because drawerfic fascinates me :D

[melannen]

I am way too fond of Katharine Dunlevy really and she has basically NO FIC, so we'll see what happens...

*fistbump* whooo write the things.

On that note, I don't really have "drawerfic" in the classical sense because tbh if I go to the trouble of writing it down you can damn well bet I'm going to put it up for kudos.

Um.

I did spend a couple months when I was going door-to-door for the census plotting out a SUPER-ELABORATE Top Gear RPF slavefic/concubine AU. Uh. Do you actually want any plot summary of that or is that enough to understand why it counts as shame.

...so like it was set in an AU Britain what was sort of based on moving the world from Study in Emerald forward but not really. Former-slave-made-good Jeremy Clarkson had recently been promoted for Unspecified Services For Her Glabrous Majesty and therefore needed a second concubine to keep up appearances so he bought James May super-cheap because James was really bad at being a slave and was up for last-chance auction. And then he proceeded to ignore him completely except when he needed him to stand there and look pretty for very occasional social events, so basically he just lounged around the estate a lot with fellow concubine Richard and messed with his employer's collection of steam cars.

Except it was super-boring and also James was rather offended at the fact that everybody just assumed he would be terrible at being a sex slave so he somehow got himself sent to famous retired champion concubine Oz Clarke for training in the arts of sensuality and when he finally went back to the Clarkson estate everything was different and...

..and, uh, a lot of other stuff happened too, but I'm actually kind of ashamed just writing that summary. <_< I still kind of enjoy the basic milieu I set up there so I suppose there's a tiny chance I will someday rework it as original erotica but. being in RPF fandoms does weird things to your sense of shame. I never so much as wrote one word of it down before, iirc.

[isis]

Oh, actually I like those ideas for self-critique! I am curious as to what you consider your top worst fics.

[melannen]

This was easier than I feared! When I went to AO3 five stories floated to the bottom really naturally, and they're all fairly old, so maybe I actually am getting better...

For goodness' sake don't click any of these links or you'll be sorry.

1. The Yuletide fic that I compeletly punted because it was supposed to be the beginning of something longer but I didn't start writing it until LITERALLY 2 hrs before deadline and what came out made 0 sense and went nowhere and I still owe that year's recip something less sucky.

2. The remix challenge fic which I haven't actually re-read since I posted it because the shame is so heavy so possibly it's better than I remember but I remember it failing pretty hard both as a remix and as a story.

3. The Harry Potter wip I haven't added to since 2003 and is so soaked in CC-era FAP-derived references that it's both shameful and incomprehensible at this point, which might be defensible except I only ever lurked on FAP so I didn't even know anybody who would get the injokes.

4. The one that's sort of half songfic except it's also full of unnecessary Tom Stoppard references and high-school solipsism OMG SO FREAKING PRETENTIOUS I COULD DIE

5. My first srs attempt to write srs D/s fic and I srsly had no idea what I was doing.

[thatyourefuse]

... well, the cut-tag was clearly labeled.

[melannen]

): I am currently at a place where I can be fairly practical about my writing flaws and find it helpful to talk about them but for along time I really, really wasn't.

[genarti]

I'm curious about #10! I've seen you do a lot of pretty varied styles, to my mind, so I'm curious what you'd pick as the central points of your underlying/default style to parody.

[melannen]

Hmm, okay, pick the hard ones why not, but okay. I do tend to vary my style a lot, I think, although that's more because it's really easy for me to accidentally absorb canon style? When I'm not deliberately letting myself mimic a particular there is a particular style I end up in, I think, although since it's just what I do naturally it's really hard for me to conceptualize it concretely. Something like this:

"Actually, stuff is happening RIGHT NOW," POV character said, looking over at Other Character.

Other Character looked back. "Do you really think so?" Other Character shrugged, and then looked down. There is no way to know what they were looking at since there has been no description of anything at all in the story.

Actually, something did happen. Character From An Entirely Different Fandom walked in. It was actually very meta. "There should probably be three-way sexual tension here, but actually, let's just hug it out," Character From An Entirely Different Fandom said, looking back and forth between the other two.

"That actually sounds good to me." POV character shrugged, looking thoughtful but still not actually revealing any emotional depth.

They hugged.

Suddenly the story ended before anything actually happened, even though it clearly seemed to be leading up to actual plot.

The end.

[genarti]

Yeah, same for me with canon style. It's funny; even though I gravitate much more towards books in general, it's for audiovisual canons that I feel like 'my' natural style is more likely to come out, because I find a book's prose style such an intrinsic part of the experience that it's hard to avoid mimicking.

I enjoy this parody, all the same! *laughing*

[melannen]

I gravitate toward books rather than visual (and it took me an age to figure this out--) because while I pick up the author's prose style from books, I pick up the director's cinematography from audiovisual, and that's not actually something that lends itself to writing.

(Similiarly with comics, where if I try to write a comics fandom I am basically trying to novelize the comic that exists in my head. Audio drama's a little easier though.)

[sarken]

8, please!

[melannen]

TBH when I really think about it most of my disagreements with my stats page come down to "Why does my blatant pandering to popular fandoms and pairing tags continue to work so well? Oh fandom, plz stop being depressingly predictable."