con_txt has posted their annual pre-con "what fandoms are you in?" poll, and I wish to share with you what I put in the "If you clicked 'other', elaborate here" box, because it amuses me as summary of my fannishness at this exact moment. (It's true! But it still amuses me.)

Usually, "other" means "a variety of small book fandoms, indy comics, and/or obsolete video games. But mostly small book fandoms".

In the RPS category, it specifically means "British comedians that are on panel shows a lot". (But also Discovery Channel, NPR, and various other media personalities and presenters that aren't exactly either actors, pundits, or reality-show people, and have shows and fandoms that blur the border between real and fictional; I don't even know how to describe the genre, but I know it when I see it. Mythbusters. A Prairie Home Companion. OMG SOMEBODY HAS ACTUALLY WRITTEN 3-2-1 CONTACT FIC. Anything John Hodgman-related. Top Gear. You know. That.)

Also, Muppets/Sesame Street is an RPS fandom, because muppets are real people. :P

And by "other actors" - Doctor Who/Torchwood RPS. even if nobody has written me any Pertwee/Delgado yet, sadface.

And the "Sports figures" tickymark means "90% of the time I could care less about pro sports but figure skating hits my kinks every time, why god why."

In other random fandom news, brownbetty made a post about crossovers involving professional figure-outers and professional secret-keepers, and how she likes them best when the figure-outers never quite figure it out, and it never works when they find out the secret too easily.

I agree halfway: if the secret is discovered too easily, or the people trying to figure out the secret don't have to do the work, it ruins the crossover. But my problem with many of the example crossovers people listed is that the figure-outers ought to *know the secret already*, because the figure-outers in our fandoms are usually pretty well connected and very good at what they do. And if they don't know, it's probably because the secret-keepers have been actively interfering with them well before your crossover started. These are people whose avocations mesh: they shouldn't always be walking into the crossover with a clean slate.

( Rambling about crossovers. Okay, maybe it's a little bit epic. )

How about another post about the female characters of Sherlock Holmes fandom? (It's weird how *much* I have fixated on Mary Morstan in this fandom - I'll read the Holmes/Watson if it comes strongly recommended, but I only really get enthusiastic about any given fanwork if it has Mary (or Irene, or Mrs. Hudson but that never happens, so mostly Mary) in it, with the result that I've not been submerged nearly as much as I thought I would be. It's strange to be in a fandom where I'm actually exhibiting *taste* to the extent it limits my reading.)

There is not nearly enough of this sort of story coming through del.icio.us. So I have descended to going to the library and checking out these things made of sheets of paper glued together on one edge - apparently, you can get Holmes fanfic in that format, too. And apparently, if you want novels about the women, you're more likely to find them there...

First, though, a few more fic recs:

Scenes from an Unusual Domestic Arrangement, by lalaietha/recessional, OT4: If you're reading Holmes fic, you already know to read everything recessional writes, but if you only read one, read this one: it is the OT4 that must exist.

Imagine Me and You (and You and You), by flash_indie, OT4: More Mary-heavy OT4 that is awesome! And it's novella-length! This has Mary joining the boys as a full partner in the detectiving, and a really interesting working-out of the poly dynamic over time. Mary is occasionally a bit too modern for my taste, but the story carries you along anyway.

Not A Rational Organ, by bluepercy, bookverse, gen-ish with Holmes/Mary and implied OT3: This was written well before the movie and seems to have got very little attention post-movie, which is a shame, because I love it lots, and I believe it happened. Watson is taken captive as a result of one of Watson's cases, and Mary insists on coming with Holmes on the rescue, and they both love Watson enough to let him go, and during the adventure Holmes gets confused, stops seeing Mary as an enemy, and starts having unfamiliarly heterosexual thoughts about her. The only complaint I have about this story is it isn't the beginning of a twelve-book series.

Checkmate, by random_nexus, gen-ish OT3: another story from the pre-movie fandom. This is a short bit that is simply a conversation between Holmes and Mary Watson, in which she out-maneuvers, out-manipulates, and out-deduces him, and he likes it, and she knows he does. If that isn't enough to get you to read, well, we clearly have fundamental differences in our ways of thinking.


And now for the published fic: since this was written and printed for money, I am more comfortable being openly critical of it even when I liked it overall. So these reviews are at, um, somewhat greater length. (but, then, the stories are also of somewhat greater length.)

Good Morning, Irene, aka The Adventuress by Carole Nelson Douglas
( Note: this is very much not movieverse Irene. I like this one better. )

Verdict: Will not be reading out of order, but will be keeping my eye out for the first book in the series.


Mrs. Hudson and the Spirits' Curse, by Martin Davies
( Okay, when I heard that this series *existed* - the series in which Holmes is fairly incompetent and Mrs. Hudson is secretly feeding him all the clues - I knew I wanted try it out, even if it was crack-addled and/or just plain bad. )(Mrs. Hudson! More people need to write about Mrs. Hudson, yo! If Martin Davies can do it, so can you!)

Verdict: Fun but not life-changing; would read more if I stumbled upon it. Also, very glad it exists.


Their Majesties' Bucketeers, by L. Neil Smith
( This is an AU where Holmes and Watson are Lamviin - small, trilaterally symmetrical crustaceans who live on a desert planet that is in their species' equivalent of our Victorian period. Also, they do *everything* in threes, not just symmetry - including sex and gender. )
Verdict: Will SO be requesting for Yuletide. :D (Also, *so* glad it exists. And Mymy/Mav/Vyssu is still my canon OT3 for all Holmes fandom everywhere. I had forgotten how deeply I loved this book in high school - my copy is falling apart, and I still have stretches memorized, ten years since my last re-read.)


...and while I was returning some of these to the library, I checked out the first Mary Russell book. And one of the Moriarty books (the series where it's Moriarty who secretly solves the crimes and gives Holmes the credit - no, I'm not sure how that works either) so there may be another set of these, after I read those. Also, I checked out Lord John and the Private Matter, Monstrous Regiment, and Pride/Prejudice, for all your Queer Age of Sail needs. I have reviews of those half-written that I'll probably post to age_of_sail when they're done.

So, a long, long time ago, before I had an online journal or interacted with fandom in any way, back before Wikipedia ruled the internets, I used to post on Everything2, which is a wikipedia competitor with a very different structure, ethos, and culture. (As much as I do like the Wiki system, I wish more sites used an E2 framework instead - I think it would've worked really well for fanlore, for ex., with its emphasis on multiple voices and automatic flow.)

Anyway, one of the things I posted there, over eight years ago (!!!), was an attempted translation of the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer into poetic Modern English. I'm no Anglo-Saxon scholar, but I go through phases of reading lots of early English poetry and poking at the language, so it may be a bad translation, but I like the poem, and I like my version better than any of the other translations I've found, and I have nothing at all staked on it being a good translation, so critique it all you want. (I am, oddly, very fragile when it comes to criticism of my fiction - I can get scared into writing nothing for months even by *effusively good* feedback - but have a very thick skin about my poetry - say whatever you want about it, it won't change what the poem means to me.)

So there's this translation, that's been sitting pretty much ignored on a website that's been slowly dwindling in readership, until shanaqui with her riddles on poetry inspired me to look it up again and repost my Wulf and Eadwacer there.

And what should I discover but that someone has quoted my translation in an academic paper, as far as I can tell from Google pretty much in full, and published it in the journal "Language and Literature" only this month.

I am trying to articulate why this pisses me off so much. Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.

But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.

( <I>That</i> pisses me the hell off (pardon my Anglo-Saxon. And Old French.) Cue rant. )

Short version: if Transformative Works and Cultures was pay-only, I would be a lot less supportive of it, that's for darn sure.

(I tend to think that fanacademia, even beyond TWC, tends to be fairly good about freely sharing info - even when papers are published behind pay-only, it's been fairly easy for me to get copies for free - but that might be because accumulated fanmeta rep has gotten *me* inside several locked walls of access that I don't even see any more.)

(Also, said fan network has already gotten me a copy of the paper about Wulf and Eadwacer that discusses me. I am now officially recorded in the ongoing conversation of Western Thought as "Melannen, a kind of 'groupie' for wit and wisdom" --- I'll take it! Could be worse. Also, my e2 post is "not exactly post-structural exegesis," but rather "a crude recommendation" to "make the empty room exciting with your own furnishings". Hmm, you know, I don't have any titles on my DW journal pages yet... :D But seriously folks, it's a reasonably good paper which is doing pretty much the same thing I tried to do in my e2 post but better - the quotes are actually a compliment, because I'm the only one of six translators - including Burton Raffel - he actually discusses at any length whatsoever. Even if he is baffled by the internets and the way learnings happen there. And he got the date of publication of the E2 entry wrong by five years somehow. And altered my translation in a fairly significant way without, apparently, noticing.)


...er. Speaking of the value of a public domain, last weekend I was at Farpoint - my first ever sci-fi con! - and spent most of the time trying to pretend it was con.txt, which meant hanging around the do-it-yourself panel rooms and figuring out how to talk about fanfic in them without outright admitting I'm a fanfic writer. (Panels I either gave or attended: Writing SF Erotica, DIY Social, SF Worldbuilding, Webcomics 101, Sex and SciFi, Not Everyone's a Pro, Copyright/Copywrong, Convention Sales for Creative Types, and Sherlock Holmes. I want to talk more about the con later, but this post is going to be long enough already.)

One of the coolest ones I attended was ( The Copyright, Copywrong panel, which was recorded and is available as a podcast. )
...anyway it also features me as "person in audience who wouldn't stop talking". Hear! Me attempt to talk to Marc Okrand without getting squee all over him! Hear! Me slip slash discussion in under the radar by casually mentioning the OTW without explaining what it is! Hear! Me get scolded for talking too much and not letting other people participate! Hear! Me completely fail to mention Interrobang Studios, which is ostensibly why I was at the con!


(and for the record, if I was not so lazy I would officially put all of my work under a creative commons share-alike license, the share-alike being most important and the attribution being least.)

Yeah, every so often I do a meme. :D

This is the "list 101 things you like to see in fiction" meme. stultiloquentia has a list of people's lists following the spread of the meme.

These are not all sex-related, in fact most of 'em aren't. And they're not bulletproof: most of them make me as unhappy when badly done as happy when well done, unfortunately, and many of them are very frequently screwed up. (But I still give people credit for trying!)

( 101 Fic Kinks )


...yes, we are still snowed in, what gave you that idea? Also, wow, my list of kinks seems to be considerably more upbeat than most of the other lists I'm reading! I like stories where people get to be happy and functional. D:

(I was actually planning to try to make the Holmes vid that's currently haunting my dreams, but after I did all the clipping, I realized that trying to make a narrative-heavy, 8-minute-long constructed reality vid about a character for whom there is less than four minutes of footage total *might* be a tad ambitious when I haven't vidded in five years. So I got an insane Mary/Irene pre-movie bunny instead and have been re-reading "Sign of the Four" by candlelight.)

Hi! I am still lacking energy to do anything serious online, but here are some things anyway:

Signal boost via zvi: If, like me, you recently got weird malware on your system that tried to get you to install anti-virus software, and couldn't figure out where from because you'd only been on trustworthy sites, you probably got it from an ad running on Livejournal. Just so you know. ETA: a thread about it on lj news - if you think you got hit, drop in and leave a comment, it might help.

(I think I got my system clean - I have Spybot running to stop unauthorized registry changes, and cleared out a bunch of suspicious files - but will probably be doing a format + reinstall as soon as I have time to think anyway.) When is DW going to be able to syndicate flocked lj posts so I never have to go back there again? Plz?

*****

I am one of those boring old fans who's been around long enough that the slash-misogyny argument just seems tired; yes it's important, but it's the same thing I read about in 2003. And 2005. And 2007... So instead, here are some awesome Sherlock Holmes stories about women:

Commonplaces, by Astolat. Irene Adler goes to visit Holmes after "The Final Problem."

Thoughts Without Words by Katie Forsythe. Holmes goes to visit Irene, and a conversation is had. (If you've been reading Holmes fic, surely you've found Katie Forsythe's work already, but this one is just *amazing*. It's full-on unreliable narrator - SCAN is given an entirely new interpretation, as is Holmes' history - yet the Holmes and Adler here are so amazing that I get it confused with canon. And I almost suspect the naked!Adler scene in the movie was based on this story.)

Five Times John Watson Quite Unintentionally Saw Irene Adler Naked, by flowers4ophelia. Irene and Holmes carry on together and annoy Watson a lot. Movieverse, though not necessarily contradictory to bookverse.

An Ideal Husband by Irene Adler. Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes both receive the same visitor. (this is also heavy on the Violet Hunter, who was in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" and seems to be the third-most-loved-by-fandom female from a case.)

Enclosed by Recessional. Mary Morstan receives a visit from Sherlock Holmes. Recessional has been writing a lot of really excellent Mary Morstan fic of late: you should read.

Blood Shift by Toft. Mary Morstan and Watson find something necessary in each other.

five times Mary suspected Holmes and Watson were more than friends and one time she knew it to be so., by Lady Paperclip. Mary Morstan is visited by certain inescapable deductions. And also Irene Adler, which is sometimes the same thing.

Leaving, by Telanu. Holmes visits Watson and Mary.

Congenital Defects, by Branwyn. Mary Russell is visited by a series of increasingly wodehousian mishaps as the result of an inconvenient aunt.

Honeycomb Series, by LizBee. Lizbee has written most of the Mary Russell fic that I actually liked; this series deals with Russell's Jewish identity and her marriage to Holmes.

Suppressed, by Jane Turenne. Mrs. Hudson visits Watson.

Miss Madelyn Mack, Murderess, by Flourish. Miss Madelyn Mack is visited by sudden and unexpected violence.

...in other words, Holmes fandom and its subsidiaries are full of amazing female characters, and people should be writing more stories about them. Especially Mrs. Hudson, who I suspect has a lot of unplumbed depths. (I know there's a published series where she solves the cases and secretly feeds the clues to Holmes - it even sounds sort of good; I'm keeping my eyes out for it - but I am suddenly convinced that Mrs. H has been in the employ of Mycroft - aka M of what will eventually be MI-6 - for a very, very long time. Pre-dating the time at which she was assigned to keep an eye on his brother.)

****

And on that note, I just picked up the first Irene Adler novel (well, okay, the second, because why read a series in publishing order when you can read it in the order you find it at the public library). I'm only about ten pages in, and I'm provisionally liking it. But I can't get past the fact that this Adler is apparently a soprano. Adler's a contralto, isn't she? This is actually very important to her backstory, considering the different expectations of a contralto and soprano in classical opera!

Did I in vain spend all that time looking for pieces for contralto and violin solo? (Well, no, it wasn't in vain, because I found Yehudi Menuhin playing Erbarme Dich, which I fell in love with instantly and only wish he had a better contralto to play for. I want Madelyn's secret recording of Holmes and Alder performing that to exist in RL. Please.)

****

While I'm asking about minor canon points, here's some more, in various fandoms:

1. So a veteran of the second Anglo-Afghan war naming his dog "Gladstone" is roughly the equivalent of a veteran of the *current* Afghan war naming his dog "Gordon", right? People who know more about Victorian politics than me: What statement exactly is that making?
   
   I only know as much about Gladstone and Disraeli as anyone who's read "The Annotated Alice" far too many times, but the longer I watch Holmes-movie-fandom without *anyone* mentioning that the dog's named after the PM, the more I notice its absence.



2. Sarah Jane Smith currently drives a lime green Nissan Figaro, and used to own a bright red Volkswagen Beetle named Ethel. Does anybody know what model Volkswagen she was driving in "School Reunion"? And did she have a car during her Old Who appearances, and if so, what was it?



3. Can anybody get access to a copy of the article "A Pocket Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 30, 1912) p. 639 ? I can't, not even after stealing my sister's JSTOR login, but I would really really really like to read it!



4. Is there anything anywhere in primary or secondary Star Trek canon about the cultural significance of male Vulcan hairstyles and/or beards? (Other than the obvious.)



5. I swear that within the last several years there was a find somewhere in England of items related to witchcraft that included what was probably a prosthetic phallus: does anybody else remember this? For obvious reasons it is difficult to google. Or any citable links to archeological finds of life-sized false phalli in England in the last century?

***

And on the off-chance you haven't found it yet: asexual_fandom now exists! And I didn't even have to be the one to start it!

So first! Apparently the poll numbers about most slashers being queer struck a chord with people. (yay!)

As a result I have acquired numbers for several more polls now, with no effort on my part!

( four more polls with numbers on slashers' sexuality )

Also! I have been corresponding in email with Anne Kustritz (theorynut, she who wrote the 2003 paper that Wikipedia cites. She wrote that paper while working on her Master's, has since gotten her doctorate, and wishes it to be known that I was far kinder to her 2003 paper than she is to it. Her doctoral dissertation was titled "Productive (Cyber) Public Space: Slash Fan Fiction's Multiple Imaginary," and it used an actual, rigorous ethnographic survey to argue, among other things, that, er, THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

The diss isn't published (yet), or freely downloadable, but you can read some of the front matter of the dissertation. She was also kind enough to send me both a full copy of her dissertation and the numbers for the two polls cited in the 2003 paper, and give me permission to post about it all! And I had a wonderful write-up, but then my stupid computer crashed and DW didn't save the draft and it is far too late to write it up again coherently! I will try to do justice to it soon, but I cannot guarantee it, because there's this job-type-thingy I am starting tomorrow afternoon at short notice, and I will probably not be online much as a result.

(Which also means that I will probably be very, very slow at both modding and answering comments for awhile: be warned. But have fun without me!)

( Here is the short, short version of that post. )

Anyway! That in no way does justice to the data, but it's what you're getting, because I sleep now and don't know when I'll be back.

ETA early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA

I was going to wait and post this later, with a much more elaborate stastistical work-up, population variables and meta-analysis - because I think it's interesting in its own right - but the ongoing conversation I'm seeing, and the extremely clear result I'm getting, is making me think it's more important to get the facts out there, than to make them pretty.

So: Are slashers straight?

I spent an afternoon and evening finding all of the polls & surveys of slash demographics I could that included a question on sexuality. Some I already had bookmarked, some I found through google, delicious, and following citations in academic papers. I'm sure there are more out there, and if you have links to more more polls I would love to add their data to my analysis. But you know what? The results of the ones I've found are pretty consistent, across a large range of survey population. And it is, to be quite honest, not the result I was expecting, even as a slasher who does not herself identify as straight, and is used to finding people like her in fandom.

Are slashers straight?

( Over half of slashers self-identify as somewhere on the spectrum of lgbqqa. )

So, over 9 polls, in a variety of slash subfandoms from the late-teens yaoi set to the mid-thirties meta fans set, dates ranging over 7 years. Only onetwo polls had less than 50% queer participants, and that wasone of them the earliest one, and even they were at 37% and 47%. The median percent of queer participants was 59.7%, and the mean was 61.5% 60.8%.

SO when people say things like "slash fans are appropriating queer experience", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't real" or "male voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the queer community."

I think the question of how queer women can appropriate queer men's identity, and the damage that can be done when gay men speaking about themselves are drowned out by women, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

And SO when people say things like "slash is a legitimate way for straight women to express their sexuality", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't relevant" or "straight voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the slash community".

I think the question of how straight women's sexuality interacts with queer sexuality, and the ways straight women's sexuality defines slash, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

Can I say that one more time? I like saying it. Science makes me happy.

THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

ETA: People in comments have pointed out math errors that change the numbers slightly: I've added corrections in the relevant places. The conclusions still stand, however (for now.)

ETA 2 early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA 2

con_txt has their first call for panels! Hooray!

Con.txt is a small slash con held near DC every two years, if you haven't heard of it. (badge prices go up at the end of the month!) It is my happy place.

I ran an utterly ridiculous number of panels at con.txt two years ago, and I have, um, kind of been thinking about panels I want next time ever since then. The first call is for panels that might require extensive preparation by the mods. Here's what I'm thinking about submitting: any thoughts or suggestions?

1. Ducks!: From Star Wars to Good Omens and beyond, ducks permeate all of our fandoms. What is their sinister plan of total domination? And is there still time to stop it? Your moderators will present extensive evidence of the conspiracy, including handouts, followed by group discussion about such important questions as "Jensen Ackles and David McCallum: Double Agents?" and "Did Bert and Ernie curse Slash fandom?"

2. GIMP graphics workshop: Offering another Fannish Graphics in GIMP, the open source graphics editor, this year; either a "basic crop & text icons" like last time, or even a slightly less basic one (easy photomanip techniques or getting started with coloring scanned lineart.) Or *possibly* a basic & a less basic, if there's demand.

3. How To Build a Community: How to start a fannish community, gather a tightly-knit membership, and keep posting active in the community; strategies, methods, and examples. You don't have to go viral to thrive. (Preferably, have at least one moderator who has done this successfully!)

4. Cosplay: why is there so little visibility of costuming in (most of) media fandom? Where is the cosplay for these fandoms? Can we have some at con-txt please? (Also, come to the panel in costume! Show off!) Plus, cosplay & crossplay basics for newcomers to the art, fannish fashion, and perhaps a box of dress-up clothes. ETA: with emphasis on cosplay strategies for people who don't have Hollywood-standard bodies.

5. Vidding for the Technically Inept (and Flat Broke): How to start with a DVD or download, and rip, clip, and synchronize to music. Overview of free or cheap software for clipping and video and audio editing; making do with limited hardware; good resources for self-teaching.

6. Finding deep time: Sometimes it seems like all of fandom before 2003 is invisible these days - and even more recent events are more difficult to document than they could be. Resources & techniques for learning and/or sharing about pre-lj (and pre-internet) fandom; ethical questions in informal fandom research; and a beginner's guide for contributing to Fanlore & TWC. Aimed at non-academic contexts but aca-fen welcome.

I volunteer to mod 1 & 2, unless someone else wants to; will mod 3 & 4 only if they can't get someone better-qualified; and am totally not qualified to mod 5 & 6, but I could flip flip-charts!

(Ideas I have for less-prep-intensive panels for the later call for panels: Fanmixer's round table; when RPS isn't real aka "Stephen" vs. Stephen; attempts at defining this thing we call 'fandom'; "Boston Marriage", or, when the subtext goes too far; and discussion circle on asexuality & slash )

I feel like I want to talk about Sherlock Holmes now.

Sherlock Holmes was one of those stories I was into before I really knew what fandom was (which in my case means before I turned 11 and read "The World of Star Trek", so Holmes must have been around age nine. A very good year, nine.) I found some kids' paraphrase paperbacks in a library, and read them all, not realizing that they were actually paraphrase until I ran out of kids' paperbacks and turned to Mom's big hardcover anthology with the tissue-thin paper and six-point type in columns, and stumbled upon Holmes shooting up.

...that was also the first time I ever felt betrayed by a fandom.

Anyway I got over it pretty quick and read the whole anthology in one go, and have read it through several times since, and come back to favorite stories. I'm not the sort of fan who can tell you details of things that happened in CREE, but I know the classic stories pretty well.

And I've never been much for reading the fic, published or otherwise, but Holmes/Watson is one of those pairings (like Doctor/Master) that's just always *been* there for me: I can't recall a time when I didn't know about it, and know the stories and meta would be there for me when I looked for them. ...I have finally started seriously looking.

So I'm very much a bookverse girl, and generally Watsonian in outlook. (I've really been enjoying the fic I've found that extrapolates the published stories as a deliberate caricature of Holmes and really play with the "three-point characterization" idea - ignoring everything Watson tells us in exposition and rebuilding a Holmes based on what he does (and giving him believably extrapolated backstories as everything from sex-toy builder to professional violinist to rent-boy). But I've never been that interested in any of the filmed versions I've met in passing; they tend to be insufficiently cracky and melodramatic compared to the books, and Watson is not awesome enough. (On those grounds I suspect I will quite like the new movie.)

Anyway, all of that was building up to the fact that I've been reading Mary Russell fic, in hopes of being able to contribute to flourish's Mary Russell & Mary Marston & Madelyn Mack & Harriet Vane & Irene Adler & Nora Noraker & Miss Climpson's SUSSEX DOWNS LADIES’ SEWING CIRCLE, DETECTION DISCUSSION GROUP AND TERRORIST SOCIETY. I have two things to say about Mary Russell, now that I have at last been exposed to her beyond the barest of descriptions:

1. Okay, let me get this right: she has very little family and a mysterious past that would make any Mary Sue proud, and she has a preternatural ability to get 'round Holmes as if she's known him for years. Meanwhile, Watson's role is minimized, to the extent he even shows up at all. And Mary Russell has a *scar* on her shoulder and arm from an old injury and an intermittent limp. ...are we sure it isn't just that Watson got tired of waiting for Holmes to notice him and found a convenient genderswap-ex-machina? :D

2. I really don't like Holmes/Russell as a pairing. I like the idea of Russell and Holmes, I just really wish that / weren't in there (which is why I've never been that tempted to read the books.) I would have told you, before I started reading fic about the two of them, that it was because I have plenty of canon pairings for Holmes. Or it was because I'm really bothered by the "older man meets young girl in vulnerable circumstances, mentors her, as soon as she's just old enough to not be utterly squicky they get hitched." Don't get me wrong, if it's done well enough I can enjoy it - and there's a certain het teacher/student vibe that I gobble up like candy - but it's not that one. That one bothers me partly because of the power issues, partly because it's just so ubiquitous in certain genres, and partly because of the implication-through-repetition that a man and a woman can't have that sort of relationship without it turning romantic.

But I've realized, upon actually reading some Holmes/Russell that was set in such a way that I could ignore their backstory, that no, it is much simpler than all that. It is simply that a core pillar of my Holmes characterization is that he is completely uninterested in having sex with women - so while I'll happily buy Holmes, Demon-slayer or Holmes, Porn-star; in order to read Holmes the happy heterosexual I have to imagine him as being a completely different Holmes who is from an entirely different universe than Conan Doyle's Holmes. I am okay with Holmes the totally asexual, Holmes the celibate gay man, Holmes the gay man who goes out to "special clubs", Holmes the gay man in a committed relationship, Holmes the asexual in an epic platonic romance with The Woman, Holmes who shares Watson with Mary, even Holmes who got badly burned in relationships as an adolescent and has walled off that part of himself so firmly he's forgotten where he left the key (which seems to be Doyle's opinion). I would probably even be able to buy "Holmes meets a woman who is so awesome he is forced into a crisis of sexuality by way of her teaching him that bodies aren't important but they're still fun" but I don't get the impression that's how Holmes/Russell was done. (and if it is, given that Russell was forty years his junior when they met, eewww.) I'm usually fairly flexible on 'shipping, but I think I found Holmes at a point in my life where I *really* needed a story with non-heteronormativity at the forefront, and Holmes did that for me admirably.

So anyway. Yes. I continue to wish that the Mary Russell books were gen, in which case I would probably adore them beyond reason, and meanwhile, I will have to console myself by reading flourish's gen fic about Madelyn Mack (my evil plan, it is working), because Madelyn is who Mary might have been if *she* were immune to men.

All of which is by way of saying that "Silver Buttons" commentary is indefinitely postponed due to my realizing that I could say most of what I wanted to say in it by instead just writing the prequel story in which Holmes washes up on Madelyn's doorstep, mid-"His Last Bow", at the end of his tether, and there is a certain Jersey Girl contralto on the phonograph and a borrowed Stradivarius violin. :D

I haven't had time to do much reading in the yuletide archive yet, but I want to talk about the fandom I wrote in, which was Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective.

When I was hinting around about what it was, elspethdixon guessed "a steampunk comic about superheroes fighting crime in 1890s NYC, that being the most awesome madlibs example I can think of at the moment."

She was incorrect: it's actually a collection of short stories and two mostly-lost silent films, not a comic; and they were written between 1909 and 1914, not in the 1890s.

...the rest was pretty much right. I was going for "A hundred-year-old book about lesbians fighting crime in gaslit New York City."

Since it's mostly only steampunk in that Madelyn carries a pocket telephone, and in that it's set in the era when most of the steampunk technology was actually becoming real; and it's mostly only superheroes in that her dear companion Nora is a girl reporter working for the Daily Bugle, and in that they are both very good at fighting crime.

But then, they're only lesbians in that ... no, actually they're fairly obviously lesbians to anyone who's read the book, and my yuletide feedback agrees with me on that :D

cinaed, my assigned recipient, describes the fandom as " - it's pretty much a genderswap of Holmes and Watson". It's not the fandom we matched on (there will be a post about that one later), but how was I supposed to resist at least looking it up with a summary like that?

The complete Madelyn Mack story collection is available for free download through archive.org, and the PDF is illustrated with stills from the films. The Alice Joyce website also has contemporary reviews of the lost films.

I started reading ...three pages in, and Madelyn telling Nora how she's a greater detective than "our old friend Sherlock Holmes" because women are naturally better at that sort of thing, and I was pretty much a lost cause.

So is it really just a genderswap of Holmes and Watson set in gaslight New York City? I have prepared a convenient comparison chart so you can judge for yourself!

( Convenient Comparison Chart for Sherlock Holmes and Madelyn Mack )

Final score: Sherlock 4, Madelyn 12 Madelyn wins!

Am I seriously claiming it's better than Holmes? No, of course not. Nora and Madelyn and the world they inhabit are fabulous and fabulously drawn, and as Edwardian genre stories they are certainly still eminently readable, and I am so very, very glad they exist; and a blatant Holmesian pastiche that consistently fails the reverse Bechdel is just so much *fun* to play in, and I really do wish they had a living fandom like Holmes has (or, failing that, they were part of Holmes-universe fanon!) But realistically, the mysteries aren't nearly as clever, as a writer Hugh C. Weir is no Conan Doyle, and with only five stories and two lost film shorts to work with, there's not nearly as much there.

And then there's the last and longest story, The Purple Thumb. TPT is ... problematic.

( Extensive notes on 'The Purple Thumb' and its problems )

( An outline of the fixit fic I would have written, had I world enough and time )

As for the story I actually wrote, as opposed to the one I dreamed about:

Silver Buttons All Down Her Back, 4300 words, explicit Madelyn/Nora first-time, gratuitous Sherlock Holmes crossover and clapping-rhyme references. I think it's possibly the best fic I have ever published, certainly the best I've done for yuletide. Damning with faint praise, I know.

( Notes on 'Silver Buttons' )

I really feel like I want to talk more about why Miss Madelyn Mack is so deeply awesome, but really, the story I wrote is 4,300 words of me showing you all why, and after staring at this entry for several hours days, I realize that what I actually want to do is a line-by-line director's commentary of my fic. So...there is going to be another entry up shortly with that.

Anyway!

If you didn't feel like wading through all that, here's what you should know: Miss Madelyn Mack and Miss Nora Noraker are genderswapped Holmes and Watson in New York city; they are awesome and every bit as slashy as their counterparts, only with petticoats; and you can read the entire book at archive.org legally: Miss Madelyn Mack Detective; and you should. Also I will so be cosplaying her at some point: I already have a vintage 1914 black gown and black lace petticoats a Victorian adventurer's magnifying glass and stompy boots and an awesome hat; all I need is some cola berries and a locket to put them in! (I really want to find & try some kola nut, actually, it sounds interesting.)

Here is a picture of Miss Madelyn Mack:

I have been told I need to update already so that people know I am still here.

Let's see: what have I been doing since my last update?

Messing around on the internet; fighting off huge internet-induced bouts of self-loathing; watching old episodes of Top Gear; applying for jobs; fighting off job-search-induced bouts of self-loathing; reading Top Gear fanfic; watching the news and falling into bouts of loathing the entire world; working on interrobang studios stuff with RL friends; horrifing RL friends by telling them that Top Gear fandom is awesome because instead of genderswap slashfic where somebody is turned into a girl because it's okay to have sex with girls, it has turned-into-a-car slashfic because it's totally okay to have sex with cars, obv.; playing the terribly addictive flash game that RL friends introduced me to in order to distract me from talking about having sex with cars; helping Mom with her volunteer & church work; helping former roommates move & attempting to deal with post-move out issues; falling into massive bouts of self-loathing RE:inability to actually be a grown-up; listening to NPR because if I can't be watching Top Gear or HIGNFY I can at least be listening to Car Talk & This Just In; continuing to go through my massive collection of STUFF in an attempt to manage it; fighting off lack-of-money induced fits of self-loathing; and writing Top Gear/Doctor Who crossover fanfic.

Mostly, I haven't been posting because things I did in one of the last massive anti-oppression discussions have left me unable to say *anything* fandom-related without becoming despairingly convinced that what I am saying is full of fail and privilege and will hurt people. (This is my problem, not anyone else's, but just fyi I am probably going to have to work through a lot of crap on my own part for awhile before I feel comfortable speaking in *any* kind of meta discussion whatsoever, which, frankly, sucks, because I love meta. Also, it isn't helping that the fandom I kind of became obsessed with in the meantime is basically the story of three middle-aged rich white men being as rich, white and male as possible on camera.) (Edited to removed language-of-privilege, WHY IS THIS SO HARD.)

ANYWAY.

I have been around, although reading & commenting a lot more sporadically than I had been, in an attempt to manage the self-loathing.

I have also done the last four Spink comics *all by myself* while the main studio had no internet, about which I am quite proud! And I did the Friday's Trigger Star strip all by myself! And posted about the first quarter of this years's book reviews on librarything, though I still have a bunch of read-this-year books waiting to be reviewed.

And I had signed up to do a fanmix for polybigbang, and ended up claiming the very first fic on the claims list, tania_sings's amazing, epic, gloriously kinky story in which Ariel the Sprite sleeps with basically every other character in Shakespeare, Perfection, which was just an utter delight to mix for & illustrate. I did get the mix & art done & submitted in time, & my author loved the mix about as much as I loved her story, despite me being so flaky to workwith lately! So yay! The mix, which contains only songs that are vaguely, by some definition, in-period for Shakespeare, by which I mean lots of bawdy ballads via dreamsquirrel and niquerio, is at Ariel Sings Stormy Weather (.zip file) and here is the Ariel cover art. I was playing with using vectors/paths for the cover art, which I haven't done seriously in about ten years, and was impressed with how well it came out. (And listened to about thirty times as much new music as I actually put on the mix, which means I actually have a hope of being able to navigate my current mp3 collection now, yay!)

What I did *not* do, see re:self-loathing above, is finish the second disc of the mix and make a proper mix post with tracklistings & explanatory notes like I said I would, because the notes started growing in length exponentially as I started looking for actual attested dates for the period music. I am still hoping to finish that post very soon, but I have realized that if I wait to post until I've finished that, it would be quite easy to keep not posting for a very long time.

Reading polybigbang and rpf_big_bang have been great fun, too, (and partly responsible for my giving in and reading Top Gear slash, because I think there is more un-flocked Top Gear stuff there than anywhere else on the net up until now) and I am full of general reccingness for them.

I am probably not doing nano this year - I know, first year since way back before I was even in fandom, but it's beginning to seem a bit silly to keep signing up and writing less than 12,000 words - unless of course the Top Gear/Doctor Who crossover of doom keeps writing itself as fast as it has been. <_< I am doing yuletide, though. There's only been one year in history where the self-loathing was strong enough to keep me away from yuletide.

I am back from Pennsic, have been for awhile, as you may have noticed. Pennsic was awesome, but doing it justice in a journal entry is really intimidating (as is all the other online stuff that's been piling up. And offline stuff too.) So I'm going to talk about Top Gear (that British television show about cars) instead.

Top Gear is evil.

Since I'm currently alone in a house that gets BBC America for the first time, on Monday night I decided rather randomly to put it on while doing chores, and there was Top Gear.

Two days later I wake from a sort of daze and find myself without about fifteen tabs open of Hammond/Oliver shipper fanvids on youtube.

Yes, yes, I know, we all could have predicted this would happen to me. I think this is my first ship 'ship that's explicitly m/m slash though, so that's different! (And awesome. And adorable, omg.)


And, yeah, I've listened to way too many episodes of Car Talk, ridden in too many model As, and been to too many car museums and shows to plead innocent (though I'm far, far from a real car buff): I have even been known to descend to the level of Motorweek once in a long while. But I didn't expect I'd fall *this hard* for Top Gear: I'm much more a Car Talk sort of girl. The car of my heart was the car I learned to drive in, a 1991 blue Honda Civic hatchback with no automatic anything that was dirt cheap even new, got nearly the same highway mileage as a hybrid, could turn on a dime, and coast all the way home from the tree in the middle of the road without any accelerator at all: and despite that two teenage girls learned to drive in it when it was already nearly ten, never broke down. and i still kind of regret that Mom got rid of it

So I didn't expect I'd really go for Top Gear, despite Dr. Who crossovers with the Stig: I tend to think muscle cars and the other big fancy expensive things they play with are vaguely ridiculous, largely useless, and not even attractive-looking to make up for it.

But then there was Oliver.*

And that was that. Give me the epic tale of a man and his jalopy...

*Also there needs to be a hot_daily picspam on children's educational television presenters already, or I might have to do it myself. Though it still breaks my heart that there are no good pictures of Wanda Gilmore anywhere on the internets, as far as I can tell. I can't do a hot kid's TV post without her in it! Injustice!

Also Tom and Ray need to be guests on Top Gear sometime, oh yes.

I am deeply amused that my last post had some neat music and meta, and a link to a filk project, and a dozen panels of fanart, but 80% of the feedback was about the sketch of AU Rachel in déshabillé.

SO let's talk about AU RPS girlsex, yesno? :D

I have a file that's been sitting on my desktop for about six months, entitled "Thirteen Ways Rachel Maddow (never) Had Lesbian Sex With Keith". I started it way back in February, after the big meta discussion about the ethics of 'shipping a real-life lesbian with a (presumably) straight man - the f_w post that rounded it all up has been deleted, but the start of it (more or less) was my comment here about Rachel/Keith and genderswap in havocthecat's journal. So Rachel, Keith, and genderfuckery, yes.

I have been slowly adding to the file in bits and bobs ever since, but I've come to the conclusion that I'm never going to write these stories (though if I did write one out full-length, it would be either #5 or #13. Or #10 and #11. Or #8 and #9. Or...)

Anyway! Yes, I totally love the story-sketches in that file and wish they existed full length: the reason I will never write them (besides my general inability to finish fic) is that I have come to realize that I still have limits when it comes to RPS. I'll read anything (well, theoretically: large sections of RPS still bore me); I'll draw anything (that I'm willing to draw in any other live-action fandom, anyway, there are limits to where I'll go with real peoples' bodies even if they're playing other people); I'll write genfic and AUs and really mild 'ship stories and crossover AUs set in an entirely different world. But when it comes to writing sex between real live people who have their own lives and know how to use the internet -- even under the safety net of "things that never happened" - I just squick myself when I sit down to write.

SO! Anyway! I am not writing the 13 ways Keith/Rachel lesbian sex stories. But the file as sitting on my desktop is around a thousand words anyway. And it has fanart. And a fanmix. That have also been sitting on the hard drive for months. So I'm just going to post it all. Yay?

( Thirteen Ways Rachel Maddow (never) Had Lesbian Sex With Keith Olbermann )

( here be artings )

( The fanmix: 'I'll Be That Girl: Music To Bend Gender To' )

1. So one of the things I do to kind of keep my finger on the pulse of fandom is to check Popular Slash Bookmarks on Delicious every couple days. That usually lets me see any fic that's sweeping fandom slightly before I first see a rec for it on my circles, and it's a great way to just know what people are getting excited about.

Because of the way delicious calculates "popular", sometimes a story will stick around on the list for a long time, and sometimes an older story will suddenly pop back up, but generally, stories stay there a few days and then something new knocks them off, and you can watch fandoms slowly rise and fall.

For the past three weeks, the delicious popular slash links had been *static* - three CWRPS stories and one Merlin one. I'd *never* seen it do that before, and I've been watching it a couple years now, on and off. It was puzzling.

Then, yesterday, suddenly, they were all gone, and now the entire page is Star Trek Reboot.

I think fandom has a new obsession ...not that I couldn't have guessed that anyway. :D

2. The chain of events that led me to them is convoluted, but I want these: Teeny Little Super Guy shotglasses! Yes.

3. kate posted, last week, an essay about the music of Star Trek, and how that explains what's wrong with the reboot. Strongly, strongly recommended to read. (Since then I've been desperately searching for other quartal film scores to write Star Trek to.)

4. On recommendation of half my circle here, I read Uhura's Song over the long weekend. It was a fun read, very goodfic-feeling, and had one of the better first-contact scenarios I've found, and all the canon characters had a chance to shine. And there was flintknapping, so there's that. I suspect that the reason I never got around to reading it before, though, was that I read the back, and was like "Catpeople. Yawn. Can't you be a little more creative with your aliens?"

Also ... it didn't actually have that much Uhura in it. In fact, it was rather upsetting: Uhura does a fair amount in, oh, the first 1/4 of the book. And then Magical OC White Girl Doctor shows up, and immediately outshines Uhura so much that, despite the fact that she's one of only five people in the landing party, and has skills essential to the mission, you can go chapters at a time *forgetting that Uhura is even there*. WHAT.

5. I got to read the new (and very last) Tek Jansen comic! It had more Commander Valentine in it! That means more icons for me. Also, Meangarr was awesome, I <3 Meangarr.

6. Bill of Rights-verse update: I've officially offered it in the summer shared universe challenge at fakenews_fanfic. And pinkpolarity unlocked the post she made about the starship Enhanced Interrogation, crewed by the Fox News folks. She's a Star Wars person, so she wrote it as an Imperial Star Destroyer, but I think it's also the mirrorverse counterpart of the USS Bill of Rights. :D (Somebody, somebody write the mirrorverse crossover with the ISS Enhanced Interrogation crew!)

I'm going to put up a Bill of Rights index post at some point, but I want to actually post more fic for it first. :P

So there is a meme in which people list ten of their favorite ships that no-one may ever break up, and they try to get people to see if they all have anything in common! So here's some of the 'ships that I'm totally tinhat about, where you can do whatever you want in the story as long as you keep my ship in and I'll be happy:

1. James T. Kirk/Enterprise (Also, Enterprise/Everyone)
2. Jack Sparrow/Black Pearl/Barbossa
3. River Tam/Serenity (Also, Kaylee, Mal, Wash & Inara/Serenity: they're not with each other, they're just all with her.) (The Enterprise crew are all with each other too, though.)
4. the Doctor/the TARDIS (also, the Doctor/Bessie.)
5. Stephen Colbert/the Colbert Report
6. Han Solo/Millennium Falcon/Lando Calrissian
7. Ray Vecchio/the Riv (theirs is a doomed and tragic love.)
8. Dean Winchester/the Impala
9. John Sheppard/Atlantis/Rodney McKay
10. Bruce Wayne/Gotham City

...I may, on occasion, take the word "ship" slightly too literally...

(I was listening to my book on tape of "Presumption of Death" yesterday, for my Dorothy Sayers/Torchwood fest fic that's now officially two days overdue, and I got to the bit where Flying Officer Jerry Wimsey of the RAF is describing what it feels like to stroke a spitfire, and I kind of melted. I mean, young Jerry was win *anyway*, but when you add my pre-existing weakness for flying aces... yeah. mmmmmm.)

Hi! I am still way behind on internets stuff (I have something like twenty fic tabs up, and yes, damned_colonial, I'll do those AoS posts eventually), but I did at least catch up on comments to my own posts, and related things.

It's been ages since I had a post with collapsed comments; I forget how much sheer *time* it takes to stay abreast, not to mention social energy. And I now have more people watching this account than I had watching my LJ at any point over the five years I had it. So - hi? I have no idea how people with hundreds of circle people do it.

I also read a bunch of the other 13th Child posts, and all the ST responses I had open, commented on a bunch of them, and then rapidly lost track of which ones I needed to reply back to. Oops.

But! The poll has spoken! starry_sea exists! If you want to get in on me trickling out fair copies of all the pirate TOS e-books I torrented, you should join. Also you should join if you want to talk about ST:TOS, the Star Trek books, why the new movie missed the point but was fun anyway, and the other sorts of ST things I tend to maunder on about. Also if you would like to come on as a co-mod, please speak up; I tend to be very laid-back about modding and co-modding. I will hopefully have an intro post up by tomorrow, and some book re-read stuff shortly thereafter.

Also, one thing I kept seeing in the movie reaction posts was people who liked the movie but had no inspiration to write fic about it. I had the opposite reaction: I never had much inspiration to fic for the original continuity (well, except in Rihannsuverse), partly because there was so much already there. But the movie hit that balance for me of "this is fun and full of interesting bits, but it's actually really terrible" that makes me want to fic it.

So here, for sharing, are the stories I now want to write about ST:Reboot. Please write them (or link me to them), so I don't have to:
( Six stories, and shockingly, only one is about McCoy. )

Hello to new subscribers! And everybody else! I will getting to all the online stuff I need to be doing soon, I swear. I've been offline all weekend, more than I was planning to be, and I am *so* behind.

By which I mean, stellar_dust and I went to see the new Star Trek movie with Mom yesterday!

From here on in, there may be spoilers in cuts and comments on this entry. !! I haven't been reading anyone elses' reaction posts, but if you posted it in the last two days, chances are I have it open it a tab to read as soon as this goes up.

To start with, I liked the movie. It was a good movie! It was fun! It was laugh-out-loud funny in many places! The characters were great, the characterization was great, the actors all did either a great job mimicking the originals or a better job than the originals. It was deeply geeky and full of glee and was clearly made by somebody who loved Star Trek and thinks Kirk and Spock are doing it.

And now I am going to be one of the people in that Onion video and list ( all the things that were wrong with it. )

Also, Spock is still totally a mind-slut.

ANYWAY. It was a fun movie. If you have any interest in Star Trek, or SF action flicks, or both, it's probably worth seeing. It has a lot more Leonard Nimoy in it than I was expecting, and plenty of old!Trek outtakes, and a lot of fun non-ST-specific sci-fi summer movie stuff. They considerately made it officially AU, so I don't have to be angry about the way it ruined canon. And it has rekindled my love of the real Star Trek.

... by which I mean the fanfic and the early Bantam and Pocket Books novels. If you know them at all, you may have noticed up in the cut there that I kind of live in the world of the books (and the animated series). C'thia! Rihannsu! Klingon Chess! Captain April's cardigans! The clone of Captain Kirk who the female Romulan Commander won in a duel and dragged off to dress up as her frilly delicate boytoy! That one where they all turn into mermaids! That one where they all get genderswapped and girl!Kirk is totally about two seconds from sleeping with Captain Kang before Spock interrupts! The fact that T'hy'la totally means 'soulbond', no, Jim, I don't care how many footnotes you write denying it.

You know what I'm talkin' about.

Anyway, now I'm working on putting together a packet of e-books that people who like the new movie should read. You know, 'Star Trek the Gay High School AU: the Original Version'. ( Here's my preliminary list, any suggestions to add? )

Am tempted to make a Dreamwidth community starry_sea, specifically for the sort of Star Trek fans who know what "Starry Sea" is a quotation from. To which I could upload e-books and host discussions about things like the Ruling Queen and T'hy'la and Spockanalia and David Gerrold and stuff.(Wow, there's like twelve new DW communites with "Star Trek" in their interests since Thursday.)

Every time somebody posts on dreamchasers that they have "won the open id lottery", my brain translates that as "I wrote/found some really hot and shameless smut! And it was easy!" And then I'm disappointed.

Anyway, as most of you probably know by now, for the past two years I have been journaling almost entirely on journalfen.net rather than on livejournal. This gives me a really upside-down perspective about all of the hand-wringing going on about the TRAUMA of moving to Dreamwidth, let me tell you. So, as one of the couple dozen people who blog primarily on Journalfen, I want to share my perspective on migration.

This is why it was a no-brainer for me to move to DW:

1. ( The site is fan-friendly, fairly small, personal, and not fixated on financial growth. )

2. ( The software here *works*. )

3. ( I like the people who are here. )

If there's one important thing I learned from migrating, it's that when everybody is done moving and settling, you will still have a community. It will be different than before. It will be better. Regardless of which service you wind up on: You'll lose readers. You'll drop people who you read. What you post about will change, and the way it effects the network will change. But each service has benefits that attract different people, and you will settle in to the one that suits you best, and the other people on that service will be people who agree with you about it being the best, and this is a good basis for making new friends. You'll get new readers. You'll find new journals to read. The people who really matter will stick around one way or another, because if it really matters, you'll make it work. And the rest of it isn't the end of the world.

Anyway, I loved it at JF, and I'm not leaving, but I'm glad a lot of the JF people are here on Dreamwidth, too. The people who tough it out and blog on Journalfen are an amazing bunch of people, with a wide diversity of interests. Let me introduce you to some of the JF people who've been posting interesting stuff on DW:

ashenmote has made the best commentary yet on redirecting comments in crossposts.
cyprinella will make you want a bog of your own.
ionized just posted a gay marriage round-up that is possibly the funniest thing I have read all week.
trouble has been running history and thinking about disability.

You'll note that none of those journals really scream "fandom" at first glance. Yeah - here's a secret: Journalfen is supposedly a service just for fans, but most of the people who blog there aren't really mostly about fandom. In fact, a lot of the most interesting things going on at JF aren't just about media fandom; if you've never gone beyond the fandom_ communities you've been missing the best part! By far, the most awesome thing on JF is the hot_daily community, run by puipui, which posts a picture every day of a hot person. What makes the community so much fun is that "hot' is an infinitely variable description - people of every size, gender, age, race, and shape come through, and they are all hot.

At the beginning of every month there's a special giant picspam post, the topic of which is selected by popular vote. This month's poll is almost over, and it's a write-in poll! Muppets are currently tied for first place. If you have a JF account, you should totally go to the hot_daily poll and vote for muppets.

(Why, yes, I did just write this entire meta post just so I could tell you to vote for muppets. ;) Because it's *that important*.)

So I just watched Leverage. (It was an accident! It's only half a season, it's totally possible to accidentally watch half a season. And we'll leave off the vast amount of frustration involved in figuring out how to get the TNT streaming video to work. And in finding the list of episodes in original intended order. It was completely and totally an accident¹.)

And the most interesting thing about this experience is: when I saw the first shot of the team, I was *completely* wrong about which character was which - I thought Nate was Eliot, Eliot was Alec, Alec was Nate, Sophie was Parker and Parker was Sophie.

This is interesting because I had just read through most of brown_betty's Leverage recs list, so you'd think I'd know which of the characters was black and which had long hair and which was freaky-pale blond and which was a brunette. But no. I had it not only wrong, but pretty much backward. (For the record, best as I can reconstruct: I thought Hardison looked vaguely like Justin Long, Eliot was the stocky, buttoned-up type, Parker looked like a grown-up River, and Sophie vaguely like Cordelia, only shorter, grown-up and more authentically blonde. Nate was just this shadowy, Tracer Bullet-like figure off in a corner somewhere. Yeah, I was a BIT WRONG. Oh, and Sterling was young and lanky.)

This could be just me. I am also the person who managed to get through two entire Harry Potter books thinking Malfoy had dark hair and remained convinced that Director Skinner was black even after watching several episodes of the X-Files with him in them, including the one where he's wearing nothing but Y-fronts. And I know that in my own writing, fan and otherwise, there tends to be almost no physical description of characters at all, unless I make a special effort to put it in. But I went back and re-read some of the same fic, and no, there really wasn't anything I was missing.

I was thinking about this especially in light of zvi's recent post about skin color in fic, which interestingly managed to be inspired by a Leverage fic and *still* not spoil me for the skin color of the characters. Obviously, what I was noticing isn't just race, but is there a tendency for fic writers of a certain style and feel to simply leave out all the character description, or to leave out certain kinds? Is it something I manage to self-select for when I'm just starting a fandom? (I went back to that recs list and pulled out a couple more stories, and a couple of them would have made it very clear who was who.)

Anyway, Leverage is amazing and fun. ( More first reaction to Leverage under the cut )

...also, Leverage didn't hit the embarassment squick once, even though it seemed like the sort of show that would. I think it's because they're all so completely in control so much of the time, and I trust the characters and the narrative to take care of it, whatever it is.


¹ Why it was Leverage I accidentally watched when I have Merlin, Torchwood, a bunch of Doctor Who and Stargate and Bones and House, and Highlander and Due South and Naruto all queued up to watch? When I was little, turning the TV on was a privilege you only got when everything else was taken care of. So now I'm a grown-up, it seems to work the same way: I can only watch shows two ways, either as a major treat to get when I've accomplished a lot, or by accident. All those other shows have been built up into something major. So I watched Leverage by accident instead.

So, if people ask me what fandom I'm in, I have two options: pull out the long text file that I use when I'm offering to beta or write in a multifandom fest; or say "just fandom!"

I have been "in" a fandom a few times, in the sense of really working to build relationships and creations within a particular canon, but I never quite felt comfortable; we were brought together by one thing only, and it was fun, but just by nature of being limited to that one shared interest, there was a lot of conformity and round pegs jammed in square holes. And then I went multifannish, and then panfannish, and then just plain fannish, and this is where my head belongs, really always has. But right now, I'm, to a really kind of strange extent, keeping my fandom-as-community separate from my fandom-as-creativity.

( By which I mean... )

So one thing I'm hoping my new fresh start here will do is help me make a place where I can be panfannish, butterfly around and be attached to no particular fandom, but still be both productive and connected in a new way. I'm going to keep my JF account, and keep posting there the kind of things I've been posting, and try to post here the sorts of things I've been failing-to-post there, and build a network that'll help me do that. I think the watch/trust split will help with that, too; I can have reading-people and interacting-people and they can be both, but they don't have to be.

We'll see if it works!

(So far, so good. This was originally going to be a very different post about how cool it is that, according to del.icio.us, the most common fandom tags for fanfic at the moment are Merlin, bandom, SGA, SPN, Torchwood, Harry Potter - and Yuletide. Apparently I am not the only person who's engaging through tiny fandoms as much as large ones!)