DAMN YOU COMICS

STOP BEING AWESOME

STOP IT

I have things I need to DO with my life, I cannot spend entire days plowing through backissues and I especially cannot start reading new ones no matter how deliciously fangirlservicey they are (fuck you, Captain America 620, FUCK YOU, I DON'T TRUST YOU, I'VE BEEN HURT BEFORE), and I just, I can't do this again, it will ruin my life and break my heart, AGAIN. They're already starting to break my heart, because Marvel and DC have no discernible difference as far as their mind-boggling misogyny, particularly the post-backlash expressions thereof (superhero comics in the eighties: surprisingly decent on this front, in a limited and painfully dated kind of way).

But no fandom has ever been as perfect and satisfying to me as comics--well, except Doctor Who, nearly. Apparently my heart is only truly happy when I have a literal cast of, at minimum, dozens to play with, preferably over the span of at least 40 years. This is such an incredibly inconvenient preference to have when combined with my obsessive completism and just general obsessiveness. The amount of shit I've been downloading is just plain terrifying, and so far I've been limiting myself strictly to Avengers-related things and characters, but X-Men stuff is next and that's like its own frighteningly gigantic universe and I am not ready for my life to be eaten again! Except obviously I am, I hate my life right now, that's why I'm diving into my dozens of gigabytes of old comics and refusing to come up. But this cannot end well.

whine + discussion topic

AS USUAL, the story I've actually started work on, like actually writing, is not either one of my real ideas for the fandom but some random other thing that I saw a prompt about and just started making words. I feel like, if I'm going to be making words, I should be working on the thing that I'm already 13,000 words into--also to a prompt, which I actually claimed, which I never do because of exactly this kind of situation--but that one has SO MUCH left, and then the whole thing needs to be revised, and it's not going to end up anything like I originally planned, and auuuuggghhh. Starting new things is much more soothing. This probably explains 95% of the problems in my life.

At least it's in present tense, I've been missing present tense. It's so comfortable, and the last thing I wrote in it was a ~1000 word scene for an XMFC fic that's never going to happen, which is a pity because it was a pretty neat scene. If I ever finish the Raven fic, which I will never do, I'll probably rewrite that scene from the other side (as it stands it's Erik POV of his first meeting with Raven, on the boat after Charles saves him, and it was supposed to be the beginning of a story about how Erik goes from "lone avenger of Jews and his mother" to "idealistic leader of mutant brotherhood," because there are a LOT of steps there, but I'm doing some of that in one of the vids, and some of it has been absorbed by the not-yet-existent Raven fic, and the rest of it is just TOO HARD).

Anyway, whatever, writing > not writing. Maybe if I start and never finish enough fics, I'll become sufficiently capable of writing without constant feedback that I'll be able to start on my super awesome novel idea I've been putting off, mainly out of fear and despondency at writing so many words that nobody will read for at least a few years and most likely ever. ...speaking of, how is YA getting defined these days? I ask not out of any serious marketing concern because ahahahaha no, but it's something I've been wondering about for a while. So many of the previous definitions based on "content you can't have in a YA book" are vanishing--almost all of them, actually, except the "completely bleak unhappy ending for everyone" one and the sex-related ones, though even some of those a little bit. The only defining constraint on subject matter seems to be that the protagonist and at least some of the other main characters have to be underage. I admit I haven't read very much YA in the last several years--because I haven't read much of anything--so this is all based on impressions and the half dozen or so books I have read. So, people who actually do know what they're talking about--what makes a YA novel? How can you tell?