[	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	|	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.

Why this is here: To let people know what my reasons for writing are, and to give a very very general idea of how I write as quickly as possible. [NOTE: This is short right now, and though it might grow a bit, it will always aim to be short, so as not to waste your time ;)]

I write for myself first, and my readers first and a half. Er, it works out, I promise. I am a rabid, mostly unapologetic review whore; luckily for you, I also like to gab critically about my fic, and am in this business to improve my writing as well as share it with others.

I write what I love to read. Fave authors include Lois Bujold first and a bunch of other fabulous authors second, Scott Westerfeld, Robin McKinley, David Abraham, and so on. I hope to write something that lasts and is filling and satisfying to read; something that takes something out of you, that demands effort of you, but not so much that you can’t curl up and rest with the book in your hands. I don’t know if I’ll ever be there, but that is my goal.

I write all the time, because I love doing it. Or, I should say, I invent all the time. I am constantly peering at my characters, adjusting their makeup, poking at them, dropping them into all sorts of hypothetical situations, and all because it is great glorious fun. Actually shoving stuff onto a page is just as fun, only you actually have to work at it, and it is work as well as fun. Sometimes it is the easiest thing ever, and sometimes I feel like I’d rather shoot myself than look at a sentence again. But I keep doing it anyway, because I find it fun.

I write with other people’s characters. Because that, too, is fun. I’ve never gotten round to posting my (mostly incomplete) original fic because of several reasons, and I suppose one of them could accurately be called being lazy. But what’s the point of being hardworking when there’s already a story you want to write, a hard story with some stuff that you didn’t have to make up and some stuff you had to make up because the story wouldn’t make sense otherwise? I say there isn’t one. I also say I want to finish my hard, close-to-hand story first, and that if that ends up taking till I die, it is quite all right so long as I had gobs of fun along the way.

Which, because writing is fun, because writing with other people’s stuff is fun, is kind of a given. Forever and amen.

Other WRITETALK policy posts: writetalk:policy

Has anyone else just not noticed this? Or perhaps it just passed me by when someone did notice it, for whatever reason. I’m crossposting this (LJ) so everyone I flist with sees it, so pardon me if you see this twice, but please:

WHY IS THERE WIZARD RADIO IN HP???

I am guessing it is there for plot reasons— so Molly could listen to it in CS. Because it sure as hell doesn’t fit into the HP world in a way that makes initial sense.

For instance, where is the broadcasting tower? I know little about radio, but I know that there has to be one. How do they know how to make a broadcasting tower, if there is one? Have they just co-opted a Muggle one? Because that would go against the Misuse of Muggle Artifacts law, right? And besides, how would any of them know how to operate it, anyway??

Second, if the tower issue can be smoothed over in a way that makes sense, riddle me this: how would people participate? Because, last time I checked, wizards didn’t know how to use Muggle telephones. Which are the one thing you can use to, hmm, call in to the show? This was what actually tripped me up initially; I can’t remember exactly what I was thinking about, but I suddenly realised that, duh, they can’t have a wizarding radio show, because how would people call in? Would they Floo in? Wouldn’t that just be an easy way to get kidnapped or piss someone off if you went to the wrong grate? Now, that actually does sound like it might be a solution to this part of the problem— I can just see people not wanting to live with Floo connections close to that sporadic bunch that belongs to a radio station. Imagine the huge amount of ‘wrong grate, mate’s you’d have to say XD.

And of course that gets me thinking about the fact that you mightn’t have the Floo network in the US— how hard would it be to control whose fireplace is hooked up and whose isn’t in such a big country? Would American wizards want to have their travel monitored in that way? My gut reaction (post American History class this semester— you’ve no idea how much it’s starting to come in handy when I’m writing) is no. And that by the time a majority of the wizards decided it might be a good idea, it would be too late and too expensive for the magical government to handle. So broom travel prevails, and wizarding radio is huge in America because wizards grudgingly use the muggle phone (which works incredibly well even with magical interference) and muggle communication technology, because bar apparation, portkeys, brooms and carpets (America draws them because the govt didn’t see the point of outlawing carpets especially if they were properly disguised per regulation— carpet racing and licensing brings in enough revenue that it makes no sense to just put a stop to it), American wizards have been stuck with using mostly muggle technology for communication and travel in some respects because the main forms of magical communication don’t scale as well as their muggle counterparts. So though an average wizard there would take a little longer to come in contact with most muggle technology, pretty much everyone there uses and follows it once the government has tested it and declared it safe for magical use.

So wizard radio is not hugely different from muggle radio in the US— you just have to have a special set to receive the signal. And you can call in using a telephone. So wizard radio afficionados in the UK are up on muggle technology— the American equipment isn’t illegal to import or use, by now— and constantly bewail the fact that their fave producers and shows are mostly US-made, and that most talent in the UK flows in that direction. And maybe this flow bleeds into the broom market— can you imagine how successful broommaking technology in the US would be? Because though it serves a market about as small as the one in the UK, that market is composed of very different people. Rich sports stars and sports teams get bleeding-edge type innovation, and others who use a broom because they really have to (live in impassable terrain, find it cheaper to get a couple brooms than to get a car, etc etc) get the new features added in after about two years of testing by professional fliers, for a far lower price. Because if you’re upper middle class and above, you can afford a muggle car and brooms, and naturally you have both, because there are times you have to see muggles, and will need your car, and times when you have to fly to someone’s place instead of Apparate or whatever, and will need a broom or carpet to get there.

Okay, so tower issue is solved for the US, but not the UK. ARRGH. Maybe the US idea for using the tower came from the UK idea of using the tower? Except the Ministry in the UK began to heavily regulate that because it was being used for bad purposes, and never bothered to take those strict regulations off the books, so they could have a nice tight leash on radio stations, and look the other way when a station complies with their demands and not do that when it doesn’t. So the radio industry in the UK is artificially stunted because of heavy government intervention, and has always lost talent to America or elsewhere.

Now, I think that makes sense, but would still love to see if anyone else has thought/posted about this. Remember a post? Have time to hunt it down? I will worship you for ever!

PS: Pardon my obvious plotty meanderings in here. But since the radio thing is important in AST along the line, I needed to think about it, and couldn’t cut out all of my thinking process from this post without gutting it entirely ;)

[	Tags	|	rambling writer, writetalk:a surreal tale	]
[	Current Mood	|	bouncy	]

And now, to continue in the grand tradition of using this journal for fannish purposes, a little discussion, inspired half by this post by snornackcatcher (“In which I draw a strained analogy between Fandom and Art…”) and half by the fact that I have been thinking extensively about pairings in the A Surreal Tale universe (hereafter “ASTverse”). As you likely know by now, I only have one main pairing in much the sense that fanwriters write pairings: Bellatrix and Severus, despite their differences, are together and showing few signs of splitting apart.

Not that I wouldn’t like them to at some point— think of how fun that would be to write, eh?

But I digress. So, for the ASTverse, count(pairings) = 1.

:muses: I’m relieved at the verdict, truth be told. I’m not entirely confident of my pairing-writing skillz just yet. Because though I’ve managed it with Bella and Severus, they and their relationship are totally different animals from what Antares and his Paired Half (can’t quite bring myself to say Halves. I just don’t see myself ever doing the threesome thing as a long-term thing) and their relationship are. So I am going to take a break, stop worrying about the subject, and concentrate on doing harm to my characters.

In other words, back to business as usual. ;)

Disclaimer: I am neither obligated nor especially likely to introduce any of the pairings or events discussed herein. I.e., I can and will change my mind, none of this is decided, etc etc ;).