fictional | Entries tagged with fandom

Thanks to

faris_nallaneen, I have news! That you probably already know!

Do not click this link if you a) consider casting news a spoiler, and b) don't want to be spoiled.

Article also contains mild spoilers re: David Tennant appearances.

( my thoughts here )

Meanwhile, they are filming Tennant's Hamlet and broadcasting it!

I love google, my fandom, and Wales.

How much, but how much do I love that google punk'd Doctor Who/Torchwood fandom? With a Victorian ghost???? That is wearing a scarf??? SO FUCKING MUCH.

original story via

I love this show. I have now seen all six (six! why?!!!) eps.

Where is the fic? Where??? If you know, please tell me.

So... remember the Dalek in the Pond?

How did it get there? You tell us.

Find the rules for the challenge/ficathon here at

dalekinthepond.

Are you in Doctor Who/Torchwood/SJA fandom? Come play!

Welcome post here.
Sign-ups/Dates etc here.

via

rm

Found, one Dalek. No, really.

I am totally fascinated by this. I wish like anything that I'd been the one to stumble across it.

It's no secret to anyone who's talked to me for more than ten minutes about books, but just in case there's anyone of you to whom that doesn't apply, in my opinion Pride and Prejudice may be the most perfectly structured novel ever written. I think it is shocking in its sheer, staggering brilliance. And snark.

The P&P industry's taken a new turn though... and I gotta say, I can't wait!

Because you know what? Zombies make everything better!!

No joke: this is Mr. Darcy & Elizabeth... battle the undead!

And get a load of this: just green-lit, Pride and Predator: i.e. P&P meets TORCHWOOD.

Who's coming with me when this shit hits the screen???

Also found on the intertubes today: thoughts on polygamy from MsNBC. What do y'all make of that?

So, I think about fanfiction a lot, y'all may have noticed. And serial fiction. And the whole act of making fiction "real". What is it in a narrative that makes us think -- after the door is shut, after the windows are pushed down, after the covers are closed -- that the story goes on, before the first page, and after the last?

If you think of a single-author book as a window, or a doorway, you realize that even through you can only see a small portion of the world (i.e. what's framed by the aperture), there must be so much more just out of frame. If there isn't this sense, then the story is flat, two dimensional -- it doesn't encourage wandering. But in a good story, you don't think that the small, squared off picture is all that's real. Because if the thing is three-dimensional, it has solidity. You can pick it up and turn it around. It still exists when you look at it from another side.

Think about mythforms. Superheros. They all exist and the more people use them, carve another perspective onto them, the more solid they actually get.

From Henry James's preface to Portrait of a Lady (a little wordy; James never used one word where fifty would do) :

The house of fiction has in short not one window, but a million-- a number of possible windows not to be reckoned, rather; every one of which has been pierced, or is still pierceable, in its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will. These apertures, of dissimilar shape and size, hang so, all together, over the human scene that we might have expected of them a greater sameness of report than we find. They are but windows at the best, mere holes in a dead wall, disconnected, perched aloft; they are not hinged doors opening straight upon life. But they have this mark of their own that at each of them stands a figure with a pair of eyes, or at least with a field-glass, which forms, again and again, for observation, a unique instrument, insuring to the person making use of it an impression distinct from every other. He and his neighbours are watching the same show, but one seeing more where the other sees less, one seeing black where the other sees white, one seeing big where the other sees small, one seeing coarse where the other sees fine. And so on, and so on; there is fortunately no saying on what, for the particular pair of eyes, the window may NOT open; "fortunately" by reason, precisely, of this incalculability of range. The spreading field, the human scene, is the "choice of subject"; the pierced aperture, either broad or balconied or slit-like and low-browed, is the "literary form"; but they are, singly or together, as nothing without the posted presence of the watcher--without, in other words, the consciousness of the artist.

Now, apply this not just to fiction in general, but to a single story. Isn't this the act of fanfic? To make things real?

D. and I argue about this all the time. He thinks that contradictory/differing versions make things less real. I think they make them more so -- just like multiple eye witness accounts differ, if they're true. When they're identical -- that's when you begin to think people are lying.

What d'you think?

I wonder about this a lot.

On a not entirely unrelated note, remember the Paul Cornell thing? Here is my version, the lovely

magnetgirl's version, the dulcet tones of

rm's recap...and Paul Cornell's account of same.

Kind of funny, no? We loom so large in our own minds. For everyone else, we're all just sidekicks and extras. Sometimes we're the cool best friend, or the romantic interest. But protagonists? We're all our own. As it should be.

I almost called my thesis "Windows on the World" but then decided the WTC/9-11 allusion was not quite... what I was going for. Fucking terrorists.

You guys. So... a couple of days ago,

rm said, "Hey, you coming to the Doctor Who New York meet-up?"

And I said, "Uh... do I ever?"

And she said, "...Paul Cornell's¹ gonna be there."

And I said, "Oh."

Thus it was that tonight, I girded up my loins, and called up

magnetgirl and said, "hey, want to come to this thing at this pub and meet Paul Cornell?"

And she (being much smarter than me) said, "Hell, yeah."

So we did.

Dude, it was AWESOME. I made an ass of myself only twice! Once, when we were all chatting, and the conversation turned to BBC Robin Hood? And I was like, "Wow, that show was terrible. I watched the pilot, and then (because it's not fair to judge a show merely on the basis of the pilot)... I tried to watch another one, but was unable to get through it."

And he said (in his innimitably charming British way), "Er... hope that wasn't one of my episodes."

You guys can probably picture the look on my face?

He hastened to add that he didn't think less of me. I believe his exact words were, "I'm not proud..."

(

magnetgirl quickly covered for me, making sure that he knew I hadn't made it to one of his while I tried not to swallow my own tongue in embarrassment.)

AND THEN, unsatisfied with the sheer level of savoir faire I'd displayed thus far, when he brought up sexism and homophobia in genre television? (He was talking about how there was a lot of sexism and homophobia in genre tv, but he didn't think that just because characters have drama (and bad things happen to them), means that the show is sexist) and I decided that would be a good time to tell him about

magnetgirl's and my argument about Steven Moffat.

"So," I say, "I mean, I think he's a fabulous writer and everything, but there have been accusations of sexism, and I have to say that she and I watched Coupling together... and though she disagrees with me, frankly, I think it is incredibly sexist..." (I was going to go on to say that it didn't mean I wasn't a fan of his Doctor Who episodes...)

But I am interrupted. "Er...," he says, all but scuffing his feet, "before you go on, in the interests of well, everyone, I have to tell you that Steven was the best man at my wedding, and I was the best man at his, so..."

You guys can definitely picture the look on my face now, right??? Yeah, take that previous look and multiply by... a billion.

He saw the look too, and hurriedly said, "I have to tell you that I spend most of my life apologizing for him though. We go into a room, and five minutes later, I'm all, 'yeah, sorry about the village, he didn't mean it really' and if we're lucky, we make it out without being killed. So I completely get where you're coming from."

As you can see, I have clearly missed my calling as a socialite.

Even despite all this, I had a brilliant time. Seriously, he was very smart and cool, we actually got to talk in detail about writing process, doctor who in specific & fandom in general, being social when you have social anxiety...and spend most of your time behind a keyboard, and the art of writing villains. It was great, and hearing him talk about story boarding with Russel and Steven and David fucking Tennant, was fairly squee inducing. He was completely gracious, and made sure to talk to everyone in the pub, but he came back to our group at least three times, which was pretty rocking. He and

rm got to bond about the clusterfuck their panel at Gallifrey is gonna be, and basically, he was charming, funny, and despite my attack of foot-in-mouth disease seemed charmed by us, which is always nice.

Yeah. I may need to do this meeting people thing more often. It was fairly spectacular. The pub also seemed to have a live band? Which had... an itinerant flautist? Seriously. He wandered around the pub playing his flute. There was an attempt made to get him to play the Doctor Who theme, but it failed. Instead, endless renditions of Michael Jackson's ouevre. You haven't lived till you've heard "Beat It" played on the flute, bass, and synthesizer.

¹You may know Paul Cornell as author of DW episodes such as "Father's Day", "Human Nature", and "Family of Blood".

Okay, I thought I was over it, but Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo..

Seriously, David, don't go!!!!

Please???? *epicsadface*

ETA:

P.S. I should do

tardis_bigbang: y/n? Pls to give pros and cons.

gacked from everywhere.

Empire Magazine has revealed its list of the 50 Greatest TV Shows ever:
1. Bold the shows you watch/used to watch.
2. Italic the shows you've seen at least one episode of.
3. Strikeout the shows you've never seen.
4. Post your answers.

( I do not understand the ranking principle here. How did they evolve this order? )

Rach: You know what Jack and Ianto have never talked about...? The real Captain Jack.... I wonder if Tosh ever told him about that?
Kali: God, yeah. I don't even know how Ianto would respond. Or if there's anyway to respond that isn't terrible. I mean, from Ianto's perspective: a) wtf. you went back to the 1940s and FELL IN LOVE WITH YOURSELF?! sadness-jealousy, and b) so, you kissed that dude, and by doing so YOU KILLED HIM. Because I firmly believe that real!Jack was killed in "friendly" fire.
Rach:Yeah, I agree about real!Jack. Also I think Ianto would be like, "Wait, we've been together for months now, through all this awful shit and you're in love with him and not me and then you acted like THAT?"

And from there, it was but a hop, skip and a jump to the following conversation...

( this is not fic, but the way we communicate in email for no discernable reason )

Not at all part of IHNIIHBT, btw, just us being crack monkeys. =D

ETA: And Rach adds below: "Also for the edification of the masses -- one of us is not Jack and one of us is not Ianto, we just send little chunks of the discussion back and forth, so like the first 4 lines will be one person, the next ten the other, the next two, etc etc..."

[Poll #1336040]

It may come as a surprise to those of you who read IHNIIHBT, which is sort of a pornographic epic, but I greatly dislike writing sex.

No, really.

I hate it a lot. Which is funny because lately, we've been doing a lot of it.

Don't get me wrong. I love that our story is so filthy and x-rated. In fact, sometimes I even think it could stand to be filthier. I like reading sex. Oh man, do I. Porn, for me, is a primarily written-word driven thing, and it was that way long before I discovered fandom and its box of erotic delights. Think reading bodice-rippers and skimming my way through Tess of the D'Urbervilles at seven, desperately (and unsuccessfully, fuck you, Thomas Hardy) searching for the dirty bits...! Flipping through the Mists of Avalon for the threesome scene, etc. etc.

But writing it? A resounding "feh!"

For one thing, it's really hard [no pun intended]. Sex is repetitive. We have a finite number of moving parts, we have a finite number of slots for those parts to fit into. We tweak, we stroke, we push, we pull, we slap, we tickle; we get wet, we get hard. It feels great, except when it doesn't. And if you add in too many adverbs and adjectives -- you run the risk of sounding like a romance novel, a bad romance novel.

I don't know about you, but I have sex in my head. If my brain isn't getting off, I can spasm all I want, but I haven't come. It's no good to me without the brainfuck. There's an internal narrative always going on -- which mirrors to varying degrees what's actually happening in the physical, corporeal world. Sometimes, the degree is zero. Things I would never do "for real", things I would find actively offensive or disturbing if I weren't in bed, and believing that the things people imagine or play at in order to find pleasure are all perfectly okay.¹

Thing is, when you're writing, the characters can't have internal narratives, unrelated to what's around them, because they're already in a narrative! Hell, they are the narrative. And of what interest to the reader -- who's using your story to furnish their own fantasy about say, Jack and Ianto -- is an internal, unrelated narrative that the character might possibly be having, if they were real? My feeling is, generally speaking, probably not much. Because that's like being OOC on purpose, and no one wants to see that, right?

So there's ways around it. Hence: dirty talk, d/s, drag, s & m, 3somes -- all games that are all about the stories you tell yourself. Narratives embraced and imposed.

But. I have to wonder, what are the fantasies of fantasies? What are the stories that stories whisper to themselves in the dark, or the ones they hold tightly to themselves, too ashamed even to say out loud?

Because that? That might be hot.

¹That's what I tell myself anyway. Rationalizations: more important than sex. Think about it. Ever made it through a day without a rationalization? Yeah..

gacked from everywhere...

Give me one of my own stories, and a timestamp sometime in the future after the end of the story, or sometime in the past before the story started, and I'll write you at least a hundred words of what happened then, whether it's five minutes before the story started or ten years in the future.

If you pick something I've co-written, consultation will be necessary.

You'll find all my fic listed here.

So,

rm and I are in the midst of the final installment of I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling. Soon it will be done. Woe! We will have to work on real stuff, like our novel! What will we do? How will we slack? It's a long, cold time till Easter & more Doctor Who, and even longer and colder till June and more Torchwood...

BUT on Saturday night, in the midst of the Drunken Revel which is Dances of Vice wherein there was, among other things, a pupating burlesque show (really, butterfly pasties and everything, I kid you not!) and much else in the theme of Weimar (must confess I didn't get the butterfly-Weimar connection, but I am often slow) there was some dancing and also some plotting. Or what passes for plotting...

Rach: [spinning Kali around] Have you read

copperbadge's latest? The one about Jack's childhood, sort of?
Kali: Yeah. Although my favorite bit was the Jenny part. Jenny and Ianto travel through time and space. *stares off dreamily into space* I love Jenny.
Rach: ...

Sometime later

Rach: [watching tap-dancing strip tease] We always write threesomes, don't we?
Kali: It's true. Everything's better with three...

Even later

Rach: [taking large swallow of second screwdriver (ironic, that)] Jenny/Ianto/Jack ftw!
Kali: [draining fifth highball] omg i ♥ you.
Rach: Wait, really? You really want to do it?
Kali: YES YES YES. And Jack will totally be the bottom.
Rach: Well, duh. Jack will try to pull his, "But I'm Captain Jack Harkness" soldier thing.
Kali: And Jenny will be like, "Bitch, please."

Somehow in the cold light of day, it still seemed like a good idea. So, soon. There will be Jenny & Jack & Ianto. It will be a threesome. There will be surprises. Possibly even a plot. And what will the Doctor say when he finds out?

Watch this space!

The lovely

laurab1 has graced I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling with more art, this time a cover illustrating the latest installment, There Are Some Men Who Should Have Mountains to Bear Their Names to Time. You can find the piece here. [Spoilers for the installment!] It's gorgeous, and the story really cried out for an illustration, I thought. Please do go and fanperson her!

ETA: And somehow, I never posted about the awesomely awesome DVD covers she made for us (after hearing we were going to package the thing like a DVD, with a commentary AND special features and stuff, which we are so looking forward to, btw. *grins* )

I am made of epic fail. :-( Anyway. Go. Look! Fanperson!

I always wanted to do this one...

gacked from

demotu this time.

( sheepsheep )

The puritannical, barbaric, and unsophisticated nature of this country and its laws never cease to amaze me.

Arrested? For this? Really? Really?!

OMG. We can haz art!. Seriously, the idea that

laurab1 made some icons for I Had No Idea I Had Been Traveling is so fucking awesome, I can hardly stand it. What an lovely, lovely thing to come home to! And the icons themselves are really funny and delightful and just all 'round fabulous. Y'all should go take a gander, especially if you've read Up, Down, Strange, Charm, Truth, Beauty: or, A Child's Guide to Modern Physics.

God. I am so devastated right now.¹. Pathetic, I know, but there it is.

And it's confirmed.

I am so upset right now. *laughs* I know it's "just" a show, but this is just. Wow. I can't even really form words.

¹Casting spoilers in the link.

Current Mood: depressed

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kali

lies, damned lies, and fiction

New companion announced...

If only...

Being Human

Whoniverse Fic Challenge! (DW/TW/SJA) [Sorry for the spam, kids.]

It's all true...

Pride, Prejudice, Polygamy and... zombies.

Windows on the World / One event, three perspectives!

Team TARDIS meets Paul Cornell

OMG DON'T LEAVE

tv meme

This is not fic [more notes from the trenches]

This poll thingy is kinda neat...

Writing sex: a confession

timestamp meme

a little teaser

We must have done something right in a past life because we got more artwork!

fandom as relationship meme

Wow. Just wow.

a slight detour from the all consuming elephant/donkey in the middle of the room

my heart is breaking.

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August 2009

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