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

[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.)