The Mind in Summer, Idling Along

Having just recently discovered the simultaneous joy and curse that is social gaming on FaceBook (Hello, FrontierVille!) I am ashamed to admit that I haven't had a lot to write about this past week. I also just completed my first week of work, and as kindergarteners are not the most literate of audiences, the most word-based thing I've done in the past week and a half is read a few books (none of them knock-out-of-the-park brilliant) and emcee my library's Poetry Slam, which turned out be a resounding failure because a) someone is telling today's youth that poetry isn't cool and b) the Slam was at 3pm on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Nevertheless, the three kids that did show up had a great time reading stuff out of books and I think good fun was had by all.

Since feeding my pigs and harvesting my apple trees has been taking up most of my idle time, I haven't been paying very close attention to my feed reader, which I've set to alert me every time FF.net gets a new submission in about ten different categories, among other things. Many of these posts are coming from the Percy Jackson section, and I think that's another reason why I'm breezing through and skipping over a lot of them. There's nothing there that really stands out, nothing that I want to read. I'm also getting a lot of posts from Flamespots, which I've also added to the feedreader just to see how much lag time there is between the story getting posted and someone putting it up as flamable. It's also interesting because occasionally the Flamespots posters will add comments that they've gotten back from the authors, and those are ALWAYS worth a read.

Reading these replies, you get the sense that there seems to be an idea of entitlement in the writing world -- I wrote it, I worked on it, it must therefore be good, and if you don't agree with me, I  have the right and possibly the duty to shout at you. I know this exists because I feel it sometimes. No one is entitled to be recognized as good -- you have to earn that right, through practice, through revision, and through listening to critique. But everyone is entitled to know what they did right and wrong, and it is a duty of owning that right that you must listen to all your supporters and detractors with good grace, and not shout back in your author's comments.

I actually got talking with the three teens at the poetry slam about online reviews, and their response was clear -- everyone needs to get bad reviews once in a while. But one of the teens said something very interesting on the subject of non-complimentary reviews -- "Everyone needs constructive criticism."

Very true, everyone does need concrit. Concrit is what makes the writing world go round. I endeavored to explain to him that in the online writing world there is such a thing as a non-complimentary review that offers very little basis for improvement, which shocked him and my other two audience members (I was at this point doing a little lecture/Q&A on fanfiction).

Does such a thing exist in the face-to-face world? Is it easier to deal with there? Or are the social situations in which writing is shared so exclusive (or so friend- or kinship based) that baseless criticism is seldom found there?

Ethics and the Internet

Several studies have come out lately analyzing and examining the effect the Internet is having on our ethics, morality, and willingness to voice opinions. The case is being made that the Internet allows us to say things that we wouldn't normally say in public.

Today I experienced just that -- a random writer, whose work I'd never reviewed , set me a rather snarky PM chastising me (chastising is a soft word -- she reamed me out) for leaving what I thought was a friendly reminder review on someone's fic saying "I'm sorry to be the one to have to tell you this, but this shouldn't be on this site; it's listed in the rules as something you're not supposed to post here and I'm reminding you because I want to be nice instead of just reporting you." (I'm not the only one who noted this, either.)

This writer (who did not review the story in question herself) messaged me saying I was an "uptight asshole" for giving this review, no one gives a shit and I should "shut the hell up about it" because "a third of the fics on ff.net are chat-style stories anyway" and "some of them are really good."

(I have yet to read a chat style story that was any good, but I digress.)

I was going to PM the writer and say that I was sorry she thought that way but I thought I was doing something nice by reminding the author instead of just reporting her (as someone had already done on another story, leaving the review "Terribly OOC and against the rules. Reported for using a text format.") At least I gave the first writer the benefit of explaining which rule she was breaking. And I used a complete sentence to do it, too. Interestingly enough, the second author had disabled private messaging.

So I did the next best thing possible.

I wrote a really nice, really constructive-criticism filled review to her story. Her only story. The one where she nicely asked for constructive criticism and said she'd ignore flames. You tell me if this sounds like an uptight asshole. Because if it does, I have a problem; I've been reviewing like this for YEARS.

I don't know that I've ever read anything where a little voice inside someone's head has a name. I like the concept. I also like the little voice, who has a bit of a down-home personality I feel I could get along very well with. I hope you keep her in the story. I also like that you didn't directly come out and say who the immortal parent of your original character is -- that's a great first step towards not writing a Mary-Sue. Using all your clues (like the hissing hair and actually threatening her hairdo to behave) was a great way to introduce that in a way that shows rather than tells.

I'm not sure how much I like using the underlining as a way to denote when Queen is talking; for me it's a little distracting, but maybe that's just me. Apart from that, there's only a few punctuation errors (omitted commas in some places) and a randomly capitalized word (Jacket, in the last paragraph) keeping this from being a really solid beginning to what I hope will be a great story. My only other comment (and you can take this any way you like) is that I prefer my beginnings to be a little longer to give the reader just a little bit more of an idea where the story might be headed.

For a first try, this is very good, and I really am looking forward to see where you take this. (This is also my attempt at trying to prove that I am not, as you termed it, uptight.) Wherever you do take this, I'm sure it will be a good place. Best of luck, and keep up the high quality!

When Worlds Collide

In string theory, the universe is given as being composed on a gigantic membrane, a large flat surface that ripples, flows, and in some cases, runs into other membranes like it, causing the universes (yes, in string theory there are multiple universes) to collide. If you watch Fringe, you know that funky things happen when universes collide, like what happened in last week's episode, Jacksonville.

Yeah, I know, string theory. Something you probably thought would never be mentioned on this blog. But it's interesting stuff, though, really. If you are looking for a book, I recommend The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene. Good stuff.

Back out in the real world, we don't necessarily have worlds colliding on a quantum level, but I at least have my internet life and my real life colliding quite a bit this week over the matter of reviews.

Normally I'm pretty open about the fact that I lead this 'other life' on the internet. I write a blog that I love to tell everyone about. I use Facebook. I Skype. I write a lot of fanfiction. And, perhaps more importantly about the fanfiction, I review other people's stuff. Not as much anymore as I probably should in order to remain an active and participating member of my community, but enough. And I start running into trouble when people from my real life outside the internet tell me they'd like me to read their stories and review them.

Okay, that's not the troubling part. The troubling part is when I read them and I don't like them.

It's one thing to get a review from someone you don't know saying "I didn't like this for reasons A, B, and C listed below" and another thing entirely when you get a review from someone you DO know saying "I don't like your story for reasons A, B, and C listed below." When someone asks you to read something in person you feel obligated to like it and say nice things.

Especially troubling is when the person you're reviewing for is older than you (so theoretically you should be defering to them in matters of style and expierience) and you have more experience in the online community. I've been writing (and publishing, the publishing-and-exposing-for-critique part is important) online for six years -- the person in question has been writing and publishing online, as far as I can tell, for two.

Let me explain for the fanfiction laypeople in the audience-- In the online community, because many participants lack what in the real world might be called credentials to show that they're experinced in the field and because the age of the participants ranges across such a wide continuum, legitimacy is defered to those members of the community who have been participating the longest. I've been writing for six years. I have well over three hundred reviews on those stories, with several of them having a chapter to review ratio of 1 to 20. Chapter to review ratios mean that not only have a lot of people read it, but a lot of people have liked it enough to review. It's one thing to have a hundred chapters and six hundred reviews -- that's six reviews a chapter. Nothing special. It's another thing to have twelve chapters and 150 reviews. That's twelve reviews a chapter, a much more respectable number. The LOTR rewrite is averaging seven or eight reviews a chapter, not surprising given that the fandom is large and the original population has moved on to writing and reviewing other things.

Ergo, six years of writing fanfic and review ratios like that give me...well, I don't know, something like a bachelor's degree, maybe even a master's degree equivalent in fanfiction. At least that's what I like to think of it as.

And so we're at a bit of an impass. I'm supposed to defer to her in real life, but in online life, she should be defering to me. Meaning it's going to be hard for her to take my critique and it's going to be hard for me to give it. I don't want to write a long and disinterested review because for reasons of online etiquette no one gives those disinterested reviews and for reasons of proximity I don't want to tell her flat out that I didn't like it because then she can come up to me in person and say "Why?"

I'm also having the same problem not with fanfiction but with editing and workshopping we're supposed to be doing for my Writing Essays course. This week we turned in copies of our essays to our workshop groups and this afternoon we'll be getting together to discuss revisions. There are three other people in my group.

I had no problem finishing and editing two of the essays.

The third was a disaster. Okay, maybe I'm overstating a little bit. The first two were funny, relatable. The third was...an essay. We had a topic, and Essayist Number Three wrote about his topic. It was neither funny nor engaging nor even very well written. It was words on a page, and they weren't even cleverly placed. And I don't know how I'm going to tell him that in workshop today after I'm in raptures about the other two essays.

Anyway, we'll report back this afternoon and tell you how it went. Meanwhile, I think I'm going to type up my notes to my online/real-life freind and see how rocky that road gets. Maybe worlds colliding won't have to be a diaster after all.

Welcome to the Time Capsule: Spring Cleaning and a Trip Down Amnesia Lane.

"Thank you, gentlemen, for that trip down Amnesia Lane. Burn that." -- John Keating, Dead Poet's Society, after looking at his senior year Welton Academy yearbook.

Learning to live in a 12 by 15 foot space for six months of the year on a carload of clothes, a 2 foot tall fridge, and standard set furniture teaches a person a lot of things. It teaches you to set schedules because your mother is not there to do it for you. It teaches you to clean up after yourself, because there is no cleaner place for you to run to. It teaches you to put things away, becuase otherwise you will rapidly run out of functioning space. It also teaches you that there are many things in your room at home that you do perfectly fine without when you're up at school in your dorm.

This valuable piece of information was why the first thing I did on Saturday morning when I got home after an 8 hour drive was clean my room. It wasn't really a clean -- I didn't sweep and I didn't vacuum -- it was more of a purge. I went through every ounce of paper I had and recycled two large paper bags full of back issues of Merc's Life and National Geographic. And a lot of that paper brought me back a few years, to when I first started writing. I had old drafts, slips of paper I had written down ideas on that never got used, notebooks filled with now-useless conversations between characters I grudgingly remembered I had written.

And to put this quite bluntly, it was scary. I thought I was hot stuff back then, writing the next Hugo Award-winner or something. (For those of you that don't know, the Hugo Award is given for the best of the best in the Science-Fiction genre) And the writing! Man, the writing was just bad. And I'm trying to decide what I've learned from this.

A few of my friends have started rewrites of stories they started five, six years ago, stories that made them famous. (Really, I do mean famous. These were like 'toast of the Internet' stories. I have never written one of those.) It makes me jealous because, as I just mentioned, I have never written a toast of the internet story. But it also makes me wonder, because I don't have enough pride in anything I wrote five years ago to attempt a re-write. Meaning and Mystery of the Rose? I wrote that because I was a raving Sean Bean fangirl. Now my fangirly heart is bestowed on about five other actors. That was my magnum opus back then, and now I look at it and chuckle fondly. People thought it was so good! I thought it was so good!

People also thought I was in college then, because that's what I told them, and they believed me, so I'm not so sure now how much we should trust 'people.'

I'm reading a story written by a girl my age on ff.net now, and let me be the first to tell you, it's not the greatest. I'm the only one who's reviewing it, which should give you an indication of how bad it is, because I feel bad and it's in my token category right now. And I'm having a hard time finding the right words to tell this author that everyone has to start at the bottom and work up. Sure, you may have been writing stories that only you can read for years and years, but it's the critique from having them out on a public forum, whether that's in a classroom or online, that makes you grow as a writer and recognize your mistakes. I'm a grammar Nazi now because online writers HATE people who can't spell correctly or be bothered to proof their text before posting it. I'm a better writer now because people shot me down a lot when I was younger. They boosted me up a lot, too, but they shot me down more.

So I guess the point I'm making is this -- Tari.Tinuviel, AurelliaFramboise, and anyone else on ff.net that I may or may not have written less than complimentary reviews for, I'm not doing it out of spite. I'm doing it because that's what I wanted when I started writing. I wanted someone to tell me what went wrong and try and help me fix it. Please accept my apologies for any down days I may have caused and let me be that person for you.

Crisis

In the past four hours, I've left three reviews on two stories on ff.net. None of these reviews were particularly complimentary -- in fact, all of them had several items the author needed to fix. And now, after having left these three reviews, I'm feeling a little...full of myself. Haughty. Mean. Egotistical. What gives me the right to tell someone "I don't think the way you're writing a story is the right way?" What gives me the right to say "You're making a lot of the same mistakes many beginning writers do" to a girl from Jordan who's been on the site for all of a month and probably doesn't speak English as her first language? What authority do I have that could possibly allow either of these girls to take my criticism seriously?

I liked the first story. Really, I did. It was a fairly well constructed and clearly well planned Horatio Hornblower fanfic. Finding one of those (especially after the A&E miniseries came out) was impossible -- book canon went out the window. Mary-Sues were rampant. This story had all the promise of not being a Mary-Sue, or at least of keeping the Mary-Sue as a supporting character, a stock image for the background to annoy Hornblower and keep a female presence in the room. She even acknowledged that she had read the books, which I gave her due credit for. But I spent a whole paragraph in my reivew explaining the vagaries of the Duke of Wellington's title to her and why "Wellington" is not a name we can apply to Barbara Wellesley, the Iron Duke's fictional sister and Horatio's wife. What gives me the right?

The second story was the one written by the girl from Jordan. I wanted to read it because her author's note was afraid she wouldn't get any "good reviews" because her main character was a Muslim. I wanted to show her that the religious orientation of her character shouldn't be a grounds for flaming. (And we all know how I feel about multifaith dialogue fics...) I wanted to give her a 'good review'. Sadly, that didn't happen. The story was written in a very elementary style, introducing superfluous details about the character in the first paragraph that could only come from an author trying too hard to make it look like they spent time thinking about who thier main character was. I thought the concept was great, but the execution needs a lot of help. I don't know if I can give that help. I'm not qualified to teach English yet! Heck, I can't even explain my own grammar to other English speakers! What gives me the right to tell this girl "You're making a lot of the mistakes beginning writers make, but it's okay, practice makes perfect!" I'm still learning how to write myself! I'm not perfect. I'm not even particularly good at what I do.

Obviously I haven't reviewed anything (seriously reviewed anything) in a while. And clearly I'm having a little bit of a crisis of authority now.