The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Meredith:

Jonathan Vos Post: Who you callin' Red States? *grin*

Speaking of which, I've always wondered what "Reds" are in that line.

Emily: I think we'll bring the toolbox. At least I'm hoping to. It's more a question for me of figuring out when to use what. Just because I have a hammer doesn't mean everything's a nail.

Mris: The appeal for me of characters who "would never" is the challenge of making it plausible. The more unlikely the pairing, the greater my glory if I can make the skeptical reader buy it, by a) offering creative reinterpretations of canon to support it and b) showing a convincing portrait of what they would be like together and what they would learn from each other.

That doesn't mean I think it's all equally likely, or even that I think it would be all equally likely in a world without homophobia or network constraints. But the point for me is not to predict the most likely outcome but to create the proper set of circumstances so as to make an unlikely outcome feel not only possbile but inevitable.

Plus its a question of what else I want to bring out in the characters: guilt, protectiveness, freedom, fear of commitment, banter? I'll choose who to pair them with depending on what kind of useful tension they'll create.

As a reader, if I branch out from the pairings I see chemistry between personally, it'll either be for a trusted author, or for a pairing whose effects, if I could believe in them, would be intriguing.

Plus there's just plain bouncing them off each other to see what happens. The "what if Ben Franklin had lunch with the Dali Lama" school of story plotting. It's not that anybody thinks they would or did, it's just that they're both known quantities and it can be fun to speculate about how they'd combine or clash.

Ellen must've been fascinated by the same bit. She did a followup post on "what tools do you use to keep those stories from collapsing?"

I always get a kick out of seeing Making Light talk about fanfiction, like the old "who put chocolate in my peanut butter?" commercials.

The danger for me as a fanfic writer is that I'll be sucked into the Id Vortex. Tired as I get of coyness, I've also read stories that go to the other extreme.

It's like the characters are living on an emotional diet of twinkies and whiskey. Everything is so het up with Lust and Love and Loss and Pain that they would sob for a lost t-shirt. Half of what the slash world perennially debates as over-feminization of male characters seems to me a matter of feelings junkies needing bigger hits.

Learning to walk that line is not easy, especially when jumping merrily over it garners as much or more positive response. Hungry for product and open channels of feedback = good, but it can be tricky to figure out, when the feedback is "yum", whether we've actually cooked a balanced meal or just served cake for breakfast.

I've known this person from LJ fandom quite some time before she went. I don't, frankly, like her very much, for reasons that have to do with chip on shoulder syndrome in certain perennial debates and do not at all impugn her truthfulness or bravery.

She's certainly spent a lot of time and effort establishing herself in this community, so I'm sure she's not a troll as such. That doesn't eliminate the possibility that she's lying now (hell, there's a fan who faked her own death, anything's possible).

But for what it's worth, I believe her. If nothing else, because I think if she were really sitting at home while she's supposedly overseas and unable to post much, she wouldn't be able to resist the temptation to make a sockpuppet for fannish activities. I don't know from military jargon, but I think I'd be able to pick out a suspicious newcomer spouting her very recognizeable views.

So I'm good if I write the new as long as it is for something else's sake? Like, say, the love of a good cat or to save the spotted subjunctive? Just checking. I wouldn't want to inadvertently cause the death of the independent bookstore while I'm figuring out how to make my outline work.

What is the level of Beanie Babies anyway? Somewhere below the prodigal and above the sullen?

I feel for the plight of the independent retailer. But it is a remarkably similar plight across industries – I write for a gift trade magazine, and the problems have a lot in common. So do the solutions, at least at the level a storeowner can implement. If he’s so convinced that it is some kind of sacrilege to treat books like any other product, it seems rather gauche of him to have expected to make money.

> My first novel took a long time to write, but
> now that I92ve been through the process and
> gotten my feet under me, the rest should go
> much faster.

You mean that's not true? Oh dear, and I was so looking forward to it. :)

Thanks for this, by far the most comprehensive and funniest explanation of Mary Sue I've seen in a long time.

As to Isabeau's question: maybe for the same reason people are still retelling Cinderella, Gone With the Wind, King Arthur, etc.? Because storytelling is a conversation, and while making the new is an important part, especially in SF, talking back is a big piece too.

My favorite quote to explain the appeal of fanfic wasn't about fanfic at all. Gregory Macguire said it in The Green Man: Tales From the Mythic Forest.

"The appetite to retell stories, to ring changes on them, is a huge and unslakable one. On either side of any story 97 including the personal narrative of one's own life 97 looms the uncharted terrain of the unknown. I think that writers revisit favorite material and embellish what the canonical text has reported in order to distract themselves from that urge to see on either side of their own blinkered existence, an urge that can never be satisfied."

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