hot flushes and hot men
Oct. 11th, 2006 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lobelia321I have been having hot flushes at work today from all the work-related stress and redundancy threats and meetings with disappointingly unmilitant members of the local union branch and meetings with more militant colleagues elsewhere and meetings with totally supine bugger-me-up-the-bum-oh-management colleagues. I was having physical symptoms.
I have been inventing orig characters. This has been an extremely interesting and illuminating experience. What with 4 1/2 years of fanfic under my belt, I thought I had lost the knack or simply the interest in orig characters. But what I found was that it's not so different from fanfic character. I discovered that what gets me hot under the collar and swoony are not the canon characters but my canon characters, which is to say: fanon. I love My Orli in Perfect Day (the real Bloom leaves me so stone cold these days) and I love My Dudley in my HP opus (the canon one is vile!) and I love My Karl and My Dom and I love My Sheppard on a desert island (the canon one leaves me faily cool). The only people I love perhaps as much if not more in canon are the footballers.
So now I'm loving My Invented Character, and it's not so different. And there's no canon to hold me back! There's no fear of canon mavens swooping down and saying 'oh but Rodney wouldn't say this' and 'oh there's a stray Britishism' and whatnot. This is actually nice!! And if suddenly, half-way through the day, I get a bit sick of someone's hair colour or think, hm, wouldn't this guy look really great if he were, say, Chinese or Indian? Then with a swish of the mind, I can just do that!!
85 % of the characters I have invented are young men. This, too, is strikingly similar to fandom. And 70% of those want to have sex with each other. Also, not so very different at all.
Once I've invented characters, I'll have my canon and I can proceed to fanon it.
I am re-reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and all my abject love of the man is coming back. The first time I read Cloud Atlas I thought 'I can never ever read another book'; it was breathtaking and made my mind spin. Now I'm not reading it in order, but from the middle and here and there (those of you who know this novel will understand how one can do this) and godamn it is good. I am trying to read it to learn about how to write comedy, but I just end up floored and agog and delighted and forgetting style and technique because they are so bloody good that they don't obtrude. Here's a fantastic reaction shot:
Something sudden and horrible happens at a cocktail party. Next paragraph, a one-sentence paragraph:
Someone's drink poured onto the carpet.
It is brilliant. The pacing, the timing; this sentence gives you the pause needed to digest the event and it gives you a fabulous little detail of how everyone else is digesting this.
And you know how I've been doing weather posts? Well, here's how to do weather:
A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the Midlands.
Oh, and this:
The evening was lemon blue.
Genius. The lemon (yellow) plus the blue (evening) conjures up an acidy, bright, sharp, dark image, a wonderful lollipop of contradiction.
I have been inventing orig characters. This has been an extremely interesting and illuminating experience. What with 4 1/2 years of fanfic under my belt, I thought I had lost the knack or simply the interest in orig characters. But what I found was that it's not so different from fanfic character. I discovered that what gets me hot under the collar and swoony are not the canon characters but my canon characters, which is to say: fanon. I love My Orli in Perfect Day (the real Bloom leaves me so stone cold these days) and I love My Dudley in my HP opus (the canon one is vile!) and I love My Karl and My Dom and I love My Sheppard on a desert island (the canon one leaves me faily cool). The only people I love perhaps as much if not more in canon are the footballers.
So now I'm loving My Invented Character, and it's not so different. And there's no canon to hold me back! There's no fear of canon mavens swooping down and saying 'oh but Rodney wouldn't say this' and 'oh there's a stray Britishism' and whatnot. This is actually nice!! And if suddenly, half-way through the day, I get a bit sick of someone's hair colour or think, hm, wouldn't this guy look really great if he were, say, Chinese or Indian? Then with a swish of the mind, I can just do that!!
85 % of the characters I have invented are young men. This, too, is strikingly similar to fandom. And 70% of those want to have sex with each other. Also, not so very different at all.
Once I've invented characters, I'll have my canon and I can proceed to fanon it.
I am re-reading David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and all my abject love of the man is coming back. The first time I read Cloud Atlas I thought 'I can never ever read another book'; it was breathtaking and made my mind spin. Now I'm not reading it in order, but from the middle and here and there (those of you who know this novel will understand how one can do this) and godamn it is good. I am trying to read it to learn about how to write comedy, but I just end up floored and agog and delighted and forgetting style and technique because they are so bloody good that they don't obtrude. Here's a fantastic reaction shot:
Something sudden and horrible happens at a cocktail party. Next paragraph, a one-sentence paragraph:
Someone's drink poured onto the carpet.
It is brilliant. The pacing, the timing; this sentence gives you the pause needed to digest the event and it gives you a fabulous little detail of how everyone else is digesting this.
And you know how I've been doing weather posts? Well, here's how to do weather:
A North Sea wind snatched frilly clouds in its teeth and scarpered off to the Midlands.
Oh, and this:
The evening was lemon blue.
Genius. The lemon (yellow) plus the blue (evening) conjures up an acidy, bright, sharp, dark image, a wonderful lollipop of contradiction.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-11 10:53 pm (UTC)Oh, but if you are the creator then you cannot be a fan and how can you then put it into fanon? I'm afraid, you're being stuck with canon. :D
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 01:02 pm (UTC)Stuck with canon!!! *shudders*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 11:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-13 08:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-13 09:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-17 10:03 pm (UTC)"What? Who are you?"
"You play awesome today, Wen. You is back in form!"
"Why are you hiding under that towel?"
"Wen! Don be like that!"
"Help! I'm being attacked by a... a terrorist or sumfink! Oi, you, get your hand off me goolies or I'll have ter thump you!"
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-18 06:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 01:30 am (UTC)I'm sorry that your work is making you sick. I can relate, not as much, but slightly. I hope that something works out for you soon.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 01:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 02:51 am (UTC)Okay, now you've made me want to read Cloud Atlas. I'll put it on my book list.
And I saw an autumn scene while driving to work yesterday that perfectly depicts that lemon blue phrase: a Wedgewood blue sky against which leaned an autumn-yellow maple tree branch. What a beautifully creative description that makes so much sense.
Thank you for that. And thank you for your uplifting posts. It seems the worse your job situation gets the more intensely interesting your posts become. Oh no, I shouldn't have said that because they were also interesting before. But maybe there is more of an edge to them now. I don't know. Maybe I'll just shut up and go to bed. I'm getting delirious.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 01:09 pm (UTC)Do you have experience with this, then???
Cloud Atlas blew my mind when I first read it. I am only marginally put off by finding that it now has the by-line 'Winner of the Richard and Judy Best Read of the Year' (this being a sort of equivalent to Oprah but more lowbrow breakfast and early-evening TV) but what the heck, my taste seems to accord with millions of others'.
And you saw lemon blue! Ah, David Mitchell...
Interesting about your comment on my posts. The thing is I now get fewer time to post and I am using LJ in a more distilled form to escape the horrors of my instititution and remind myself of what life is worth living for. Thanks for telling me that. Silver lining and all that. At least I am now fighting back. For years, I put up with the place and got depressed.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 01:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-10-12 05:02 pm (UTC)85 % of the characters I have invented are young men. This, too, is strikingly similar to fandom. And 70% of those want to have sex with each other.
Hmmm...when will that book of yours be published again? Because I am so looking forward to it! *grins* And I have a feeling that your canon and fanon won't be that different after all...But can an author write fanfics about her own characters? *imagines J.K. writing Snarry or some other fanon HP pairing, lol*
The evening was lemon blue.
Amazing. The imaginery is just...wow...out of this world. I'm having these visions of a cloudy sky, where it sometimes flashes blue, sometimes yellow and the feeling, just to feel how tart and sour the sky could be...yet dark and deep..Like you put it, "a wonderful lolipop of contradiction".