fifty frenchmen can't be wrong (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
some_stars) wrote2012-01-02 11:53 am
some_stars) wrote2012-01-02 11:53 am
modesty amnesty
There's a challenge going around, the first part of which is apparently reccing three of your own works. I am 100% behind the spirit of this challenge, and have enjoyed reading people on my rlists do it, but I had decided against it because I would have to fill my list with so many caveats that it would sort of ruin the intended effect. I've created a whole lot of moments that I love, but virtually no complete works that I would rec, all the way through, if they were by someone else.
However, while I was thinking about this and looking through my list of posted, completed works, I remembered that I did rather like my Yuletide story a few years ago, the House of Leaves fic, only I never reposted it here or on AO3 because I wanted to edit it and fix it up some more. And then for a couple years after writing it I hated it because I thought it sounded stupid, until this summer I reread HOL again and realized, no, that's exactly what it sounds like. And tonight I was feeling kind of wired and unwilling to sleep, so: I fixed it, and posted it. And you guys, I would totally rec this story. So I'm doing that meme after all, at least this part of it.
The text of the meme: In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Drop a link to your post in the comments.
(Although I am not going to be doing that last part, because I don't feel very communal today.)
1. The absolute absurdity of end-series items (House of Leaves)
(the text is not currently blue where it's supposed to be blue; I'm working on it)
This is one of my favorite fanworks I've created, and I would certainly say it defines me as a creator. (It was not underappreciated at all, even in its primordial Yuletide form.) HOL is so close to my heart--it's one of the few books that I actually get really distressed if people read it and don't like it, which I realize is stupid and I try not to say anything to that effect, but there you go. I love it so much, and a lot of why I love it is the way it looks at male violence from a male perspective that focuses, in great part, not on the glamorous feeling of doing violence but on the way that violence affects its victims, especially women--and not just as objects. Everything in this fic about Karen's role as editor is basically distilled meta that I never got around to writing. Happily, HOL is the sort of "fandom" for which you can legitimately submit meta as a Yuletide fic. The book is just so damned honest--honest about being from a male perspective, not a neutral one; honest about female violence too and the painful complications of maternal love for both the child and the mother; honest about the effects of the life Johnny Truant leads, on himself and others--I know a lot of people who got turned off that entire part of the book by the early footnotes, where it seems like just a bunch of edgy bullshit, but it becomes far more self-reflective.
And I could obviously go on all day about this book, so let me stop there, more or less. The point is--this fic is a love letter. It's a mostly earnest pastiche of another, largely satiric pastiche, so it goes some weird places, but every one of those places says what I wanted to say. I really feel like this story succeeds, in a way that few of my stories do. Plus it was so much fun to write--every single one of those names, except one, is taken from the book; there are lots of other phrases and less direct references, and a couple allusions to non-HOL things--and I really feel, perhaps wrongly but perhaps not, that the effect works--that it feels the same way, in relation to HOL, that HOL feels in relation to the stuff it's pastiching. The same weird echo that's sometimes comically blatant and sometimes just unsettlingly familiar. Maybe even a little of the same sense of out of control--almost feral--textuality gone mad. Because I went a couple years without reading this fic, and then I read it again and didn't consciously recognize half the references, and that's what it felt like to me.
Okay, so, where do I go from there? I guess to:
2. Waking Up in Vegas (The Road to El Dorado)
I can't actually 100% rec any of my currently-posted vids, because they all have at least a few long moments--usually a lot of moments--that make me cringe and wish I'd put in more effort, plus several have horrific technical problems and need to be remade from scratch. However, I think this vid comes the closest to being good all the way through, and it contains my single favorite sequence I've ever made--the bridge-ish section, with all the jumping and falling as the music builds. I rarely impress myself visually with my vids, because my skills are so meager and most of what I do manage takes so much messing with and poking at, but this sequence is just--it's perfect. It's exactly what I wanted to do, and it's exactly what I would want to see in a vid by someone else. I'm really proud of it.
Now if I were just reccing moments without the additional requirement that the rest of the work be basically acceptable, this list would go on forever, and be full of self-criticism. But I don't think that would really be in the spirit of things, so one more that I love wholeheartedly:
3. The glory of the hummingbird (Harry Potter)
I would change a lot of words in this story, but none of the ideas or the sequence in which they happen. Basically the style is a mess of adolescence and intellific, but the story--is whole, in a way I rarely manage to do in my stories. And it more or less created itself; the overarching water imagery and the stuff about keeping secrets were all unconscious, and it is such a magical feeling to read a story you've just finished and realize that it's a coherent whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is a story that I feel more satisfied about the more time goes by since writing it; I don't know if I can say that for almost anything else I've made.
Oh wait I forgot:
3a. NO ORGY U SLUT (DCU)
w/e w/e, ignore the rest of the list, this is the best thing I have ever done
However, while I was thinking about this and looking through my list of posted, completed works, I remembered that I did rather like my Yuletide story a few years ago, the House of Leaves fic, only I never reposted it here or on AO3 because I wanted to edit it and fix it up some more. And then for a couple years after writing it I hated it because I thought it sounded stupid, until this summer I reread HOL again and realized, no, that's exactly what it sounds like. And tonight I was feeling kind of wired and unwilling to sleep, so: I fixed it, and posted it. And you guys, I would totally rec this story. So I'm doing that meme after all, at least this part of it.
The text of the meme: In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator. Drop a link to your post in the comments.
(Although I am not going to be doing that last part, because I don't feel very communal today.)
1. The absolute absurdity of end-series items (House of Leaves)
(the text is not currently blue where it's supposed to be blue; I'm working on it)
This is one of my favorite fanworks I've created, and I would certainly say it defines me as a creator. (It was not underappreciated at all, even in its primordial Yuletide form.) HOL is so close to my heart--it's one of the few books that I actually get really distressed if people read it and don't like it, which I realize is stupid and I try not to say anything to that effect, but there you go. I love it so much, and a lot of why I love it is the way it looks at male violence from a male perspective that focuses, in great part, not on the glamorous feeling of doing violence but on the way that violence affects its victims, especially women--and not just as objects. Everything in this fic about Karen's role as editor is basically distilled meta that I never got around to writing. Happily, HOL is the sort of "fandom" for which you can legitimately submit meta as a Yuletide fic. The book is just so damned honest--honest about being from a male perspective, not a neutral one; honest about female violence too and the painful complications of maternal love for both the child and the mother; honest about the effects of the life Johnny Truant leads, on himself and others--I know a lot of people who got turned off that entire part of the book by the early footnotes, where it seems like just a bunch of edgy bullshit, but it becomes far more self-reflective.
And I could obviously go on all day about this book, so let me stop there, more or less. The point is--this fic is a love letter. It's a mostly earnest pastiche of another, largely satiric pastiche, so it goes some weird places, but every one of those places says what I wanted to say. I really feel like this story succeeds, in a way that few of my stories do. Plus it was so much fun to write--every single one of those names, except one, is taken from the book; there are lots of other phrases and less direct references, and a couple allusions to non-HOL things--and I really feel, perhaps wrongly but perhaps not, that the effect works--that it feels the same way, in relation to HOL, that HOL feels in relation to the stuff it's pastiching. The same weird echo that's sometimes comically blatant and sometimes just unsettlingly familiar. Maybe even a little of the same sense of out of control--almost feral--textuality gone mad. Because I went a couple years without reading this fic, and then I read it again and didn't consciously recognize half the references, and that's what it felt like to me.
Okay, so, where do I go from there? I guess to:
2. Waking Up in Vegas (The Road to El Dorado)
I can't actually 100% rec any of my currently-posted vids, because they all have at least a few long moments--usually a lot of moments--that make me cringe and wish I'd put in more effort, plus several have horrific technical problems and need to be remade from scratch. However, I think this vid comes the closest to being good all the way through, and it contains my single favorite sequence I've ever made--the bridge-ish section, with all the jumping and falling as the music builds. I rarely impress myself visually with my vids, because my skills are so meager and most of what I do manage takes so much messing with and poking at, but this sequence is just--it's perfect. It's exactly what I wanted to do, and it's exactly what I would want to see in a vid by someone else. I'm really proud of it.
Now if I were just reccing moments without the additional requirement that the rest of the work be basically acceptable, this list would go on forever, and be full of self-criticism. But I don't think that would really be in the spirit of things, so one more that I love wholeheartedly:
3. The glory of the hummingbird (Harry Potter)
I would change a lot of words in this story, but none of the ideas or the sequence in which they happen. Basically the style is a mess of adolescence and intellific, but the story--is whole, in a way I rarely manage to do in my stories. And it more or less created itself; the overarching water imagery and the stuff about keeping secrets were all unconscious, and it is such a magical feeling to read a story you've just finished and realize that it's a coherent whole greater than the sum of its parts. This is a story that I feel more satisfied about the more time goes by since writing it; I don't know if I can say that for almost anything else I've made.
Oh wait I forgot:
3a. NO ORGY U SLUT (DCU)
w/e w/e, ignore the rest of the list, this is the best thing I have ever done