[	Tags	|	meta, rambling writer, updates:general	]
[	Current Mood	|	curious	]

It is likely inadvisable to try and attempt to take a crack at this subject this early in the morning, especially when I don’t have quite enough time to expand on it. Then again, it might force me to just hammer something down without wibbling and or taking side trips.

In a nutshell, the Harry Potter fic fandom is to me as the sci-fi/fantasy genre is to me. I’ll read pretty much anything, so long as it isn’t along trope lines I dislike. I like some areas of it less than the others, just like with SF&F. Military/hard SF doesn’t usually catch hold of me from the first page and keep going, just like, say, it may take scrolling down a couple times for me to get into a typical Harry/Draco or Harry/Ginny story. And I’ll never get over my craving for fantasies with fairly complex political skullduggery (random plug: HELLO Holly Lisle! And Daniel Abraham. And Joshua Palmatier. And— okay, stopping there), just as I’ll never stop wanting HP fic that is substantially AU.

I don’t leave the HP fandom for the same reason I would never abandon SF&F. There’s a shared set of assumptions at work, and whether the list of them is tiny and some of the points are occasionally ignored, I am pretty much guaranteed to take a look at a good story written with those assumptions in mind.

And that is why I will never pin down a part or section of HP fandom and make my home there, even if I hang out in a specific region for a while. It would be like only ever reading sword and sorcery books for the rest of my life. And jesus christ, I can’t do that. I’d miss all kinds of good stuff.

NOTE: Above realization came about as a result of maddened thinking over the years as a HP fan. Dunno if this metaphor fits, but good god, it’s the first one that makes sense.

So. coughs What’s your genre in HP? Is it the entire fic space in the fandom, or a good chunk of it, or the canon-hugging camp, or the slash camp? I have an idea of how it feels like for other fans sometimes, but I really don’t know.

[	Tags	|	ebooks:all, ebooks:content-creation, ebooks:sample-content, techytalk:ebooks	]
[	Current Mood	|	accomplished	]

Yes, I know I started ficpdfs and let it languish. But that doesn’t necessarily mean things are always going to stay that way…I think :P

Today, though, I went out on a limb and decided to try cobbling a tiny ebook together out of one of my shorter, quasi-unfinished fics. I threw the united power of Textmate, Parallels, Mobipocket Creator, Markdown, CSS and the really rather helpful Mobipocket content generation guide at one short story, and these are the results:

• Mobipocket (i.e., un-DRMed .prc file) download, first pass of editing. Here via Box.net.

  • The good: You don’t know how tasty this looks on my Kindle, despite a few missed typos and that sort of thing :D.
  • The bad: This is put together using a couple html files I made myself, for all intents and purposes. And I still missed niggling errors— I don’t want to imagine how time consuming it will be to error-check a longer source text.
    Also, I have to sort out the table of contents and the cover image so they look okay on my Kindle. The TOC chapter/part summaries need to be separated from the chapter links so that they’re easier to click when browsing with a device. And, I dunno, my image looks okay, but could look better.

• HTML “download”, after second pass of editing. Here at my website for easy access.

  • The good: Satisfying to make everything look pretty. Primitive but working (and prettyish) nav bars, yay.
  • The bad: Again, thinking of sorting out longer works this way makes me shudder. I’m definitely going to do splits into shorter sections if possible— it’s just easier to work with that way, as Textmate, my text editor, tends to start choking when you feed it anything really long. And besides, you miss stuff editing even a short file.

Check both formats out (if possible, for the .prc) and let me know what you think.

[This is the sort of entry that happens when you are tired of thinking.]

LJ basic elimination:

Man, just…man. That rightly puts an end to my fledgling desire to move back— apparently Brad, i.e. 6A Brad on the advisory board, told them it wasn’t a good idea, and they went ahead and did it anyway. I.e., not promising as far as how much the advisory board can influence anything, so not worth crying over.

My plans as far as journalling now include trying out Tumblr for reals and learning enough PHP that I can produce something like Yong Fook’s lifestream thing, which pulls in posts from his Flickr, Twitter and Tumblr accounts (and maybe one I’m missing) and lays them out gorgeously, and does the comments for everything with Disqus. The way he’s set it up, backing up the database he uses to pull everything together will back up all the data he’s posted elsewhere, and that is neato neatest and I SO want to do it.

Also, I think I’ll go back to Generator for my IJ theme. I am SICK of the one I’ve got, it just rubs me wrong.

Book reviews:

Funny how I always find time to read even when I’m unhappy. It’s one of those things I’ve never really been able to deprive myself of.

[	Tags	|	updates:general	]
[	Current Mood	|	curious	]

Lawrence Lessig is on it. As are Danah Boyd and Esther Dyson (official announcement is here). I haven’t seen the news elsewhere on my flist here yet, so thought I’d get the word out.

I don’t know how to feel about this just yet. I don’t know how much real influence they’ll have on SUP, and although I miss the bustle of LJ still, and would like to have some of the new features they’re turning out, I think I’d rather just sit tight and watch to see what happens. I wonder if this news will change the minds of people who have left LJ— all three of the people I mentioned as advisory board members are heavyweights as far as arguing for circumspect, non-restrictive policies and so on goes.

[	Tags	|	rambling writer, recs:all, recs:movies, updates:general, updates:pinqury.com	]
[	Current Mood	|	sick	]

Things are steaming full speed ahead again on my personal archive, which has now replaced my very purple temporary pages. Again, it’s hosted on Wordpress, and there aren’t any actual stories in it yet, but hey! Go poke at it, and tell me if things are displaying wonkily for you or whatnot.

It’s been a lot of geeky fun getting things to where they are now, which is great. AND I think I’m getting really close to cracking the navigation nut. I’m doing it mostly with pages and good linking, instead of Wordpress’s annoying category/tagging functions, which just don’t really suit my purpose. So far, all of the heavy navigational lifting will just be done with well-coded/linked Pages, and actual stories and occasional state-of-the-archive updates will be posts. There will only be about three categories or so, and if it all works, anyone visiting my site should be able to vaguely understand what I’m about and get reading within a couple of clicks.

As far as writing goes…ggrh. I’ve decided what I want to do re: the AST universe, but I just don’t know whether to talk about it yet. So far, my decisions have only produced an okayish one-shot from Severus’ pov, lots of outlining and scavenging of the HP Lexicon, and not much else. And I keep tripping over my self-doubt and my preconceptions about writing and what it should be.

But that’s another post.

My third bit of news is that you should all totally rent Eastern Promises right fucking now. It’s not a perfect movie; heck, it’s even annoying quite a few times. And the main female character’s actions are supremely irritating to watch. But Viggo Mortensen, as Nikolai, and some other guy Vincent Cassel as Kirill, steal and save the fucking movie. And my inner language geek pored happily over the very interesting intersection between the London accent and the Russian accent, and was satisfied.

Fourth bit of news: I CAN HAZ KINDLE, GUYS. :D. I just…I spent last weekend reading books on it, and I’m hooked. Just like I knew I would be. The moment I can get back to my fanfic—>ebook project, I’m there again. Just have to wrestle away time from boring school stuff, and I’m gold.

[	Tags	|	fic-length:short, fic-verse:ast, fic:all	]
[	Current Mood	|	accomplished	]
[	Current Music	|	Robin (The Hooded Man) by Legend	]

And here it is, the result of some creative outlining. Yes, the tags on this post probably don't make sense; I will be outlining what I now mean when I tag something fic-verse:ast. Otherwise, if you want a sharpish draught of unedited, nineteen-year-old Severus on a mission, read on.

A/N: Warning for adult themes and language. Also, here be dubious consent, graphic sexual descriptions, swearing and general adult theme. Please pretend that Aberforth Dumbledore has the same sort of Scottish accent as Craig Ferguson; trust me, it makes it all better. Pairing is kind of a spoiler: Aberforth/Severus.

Summary: The year is 1979. Severus Snape is 19, and has been commanded to be desperate. He obeys…with disconcerting results.

[	Tags	|	meta, policy, updates:general	]
[	Current Mood	|	accomplished	]

The title of this post is basically the law of my life, just now. It’s taken a while for me to realise it (no surprise there), but there it is. My best decisions are ones that I make over and over and over again, after hours of thought. I prod and adjust and flounce away and flounce back and think things over until I’m sick of them. Then I make a decision, and keep on prodding at it to see if it holds up.

My decision to write fanfiction has held up for the last two or three years. It still holds.

My decision to build a personal archive has held up for the last year or eight :D. It still holds (and, if you’re not put off by works in progress, you can take a peep here to see how it’s holding).

My decision to write in the A Surreal Tale universe— for it is a universe now— has held up for the last two years. It still holds.

You’ve heard about those decisions a lot over the last year, if you’ve followed me on LJ or kept track of my changing profile at FF.net. One decision you haven’t heard much about, though, is my decision to be in HP fandom.

( You see, I thought I didn't have to make that decision. )

So, my decision to be part of HP fandom has held up since I picked up the first book, and got lost. It’s been closely questioned, ignored, avoided, prodded with sharp sticks, and slowly backed away from. It still holds.

And writing the AST universe as part of the larger HP universe…it’s consciously rearing up its head for the first time. It’s an old, half-made decision. But I hope it holds.

As always, this entry is all about how I make sense of things. I don’t doubt that other ways of participating in fandom exist, and agree that there’s more than fifty ways of measuring when you become a fan of something. But I’ll always think the way that matters most for measuring yourself is the one that you use. A broad standard that makes sense for everyone else may not makes sense for you, so.