kathleen_dailey

I recced this song about six years ago, and I'm re-reccing it now in honour of the Feast of St. Mary Magdalene: "The Ballad of Mary Magdalen," by Cry Cry Cry (Dar Williams, lead vocal; Lucy Kaplansky; and Richard Shindell, music and lyrics).

This song tells the story as I've always envisioned it.


( Lyrics under the cut )

Via scarfman, I saw a very funny Tumblr post about Diana Gabaldon's "do as I say, not as I do" stance on fanfic. Gabaldon wouldn't be pleased to know that if it wasn't for the (helpful and generous, I have to say) advice she gave when I was a member of the Craft of Writing board on CompuServe back in the 1990s, I might not have written the second novel about the Romulan Commander. (Of course, the word "fanfic" and the subject matter of the story never appeared in the discussion threads.)

She'd probably be even less pleased to know that I acknowledged her in the foreword. :-)

I was sick last week and thus couldn't post this rec in time for More Joy day. This story certainly gave me joy, though, so I'm hoping that late is better than never. (The story was written in 2010, and I've no idea whether the author is still active in fandom.)

"The Orion-on-Vulcan Method" by anodyna

Chapters: 1/1
Words: 6,963
Category: F/M
Fandom: Star Trek (2009)
Rating: Teen and Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Spock Prime/Gaila
Characters: Gaila (Star Trek), Spock Prime
Additional Tags: Het, Vulcan, Rare Pairing
Author's summary: Gaila needs somewhere to recuperate after being injured in the Battle of Vulcan. What better place than with Spock Prime on the Vulcan colony world? Hijinx, cultural misunderstandings, and unlikely romance ensue.

"Rare pairing" and "unlikely romance"--those two phrases are the epitome of understatement in the context of this story. I never would have imagined this pairing, and yet it hits every target for me.

As I said in my comment on AO3, I seldom read reboot fic. But the author has written a smart and observant Gaila, and a Spock Prime who is a self-assured, insightful, wryly perceptive, emotionally stable ADULT. After decades of enduring fanfic that portrays Spock as the exact opposite of all those things, I was delighted to find this work. (It's the first part of a four-part series.) The story is both satisfyingly layered and highly entertaining, and the author's command of the craft is impressive.

Recommended reading, even if you're not a fan of the reboot universe.

There's too much tragedy and loss and general awfulness in the greater and smaller world to bear in this so-called season of joy, so I'm practicing a rigorous discipline of RL avoidance and trying to think about nothing but fandom right now.

( Some upliftingness follows )

Now to see whether I can persuade my ancient Walkman that it remembers how to play cassettes.

1. Sometimes when I'm faffing about on AO3, I accidentally discover an old story by a new (to me) author and then wonder why I'd never heard of them before. That happened recently when I found "Even Archangels Get the Blues" by RevDorothyL. The author says that this was their first fanfic, and I am impressed--not just because the story touches on some of my favourite themes (theology, eschatology, the rebirth of heroes) but because the characters' voices are interesting and fun. Recommended for fans of Xena, Buffy, and/or metaphysics.

2. While purging a storage closet, I came across a surviving copy of an old letterzine that I once subscribed to. The editors of letterzines would collect typewritten submissions, paste them up, photocopy them, and mail the finished zines out to subscribers several times a year. This was how we exchanged LOCs, reviews, illos, opinions, and personal news with other fans across the country and around the world. Rediscovering the letterzine made me remember how enjoyable it was to see this type of fannish ephemera turn up in the actual, tangible mailbox.

3. I'm sad that Pretty Hard Cases won't be returning for a fourth season. It took me a little while to warm up to the show, but Adrienne C. Moore and Meredith MacNeill brought such realism and chemistry to their characters and their relationship that I became quite invested in them. Many of the episodes were pretty standard police procedurals, but the characters and the settings made the show entertaining and multilayered. Add this to the long, long list of Shows I Miss So Much.

TIL that January 21 was Judith Merril's birthday. I remember so vividly her gig as "The UnDoctor" when she was hosting "Doctor Who" on TVO in the late 1970s/early 1980s. Along with Michael Magee's batshit "Magee and Company," the show was my restorative medicine after a typically awful day at law school.

In the second RC novel, I named a very minor Romulan character "Meril" in honour of Judith.

I wonder how many contemporary SF fans know the extent and scope of her pathbreaking history in science fiction.

Why did Courtney's "Waterworks" fanvid get me where I lived? After all, I've been watching BCS for all six seasons, and although Odenkirk has strongly reminded me visually of KC since his first appearance on Breaking Bad, I didn't feel a frisson of fannish emotion or fannish character connection until I saw the vid.





The music was eerily appropriate for the episode, and of course Courtney's sensitive choice and editing of ep clips made the whole thing stunning (almost literally). I really don't remember the last time I was so affected by any fanwork of any kind. It's been decades, maybe.

I've been obsessively rewatching the vid for a few days, and no doubt I'll watch it many more times before the series finale next week. Heartbreaking, as was "Waterworks" itself.

What can ever take the place of BCS? I really have to binge the whole series at some point in the future.

Admittedly, I don't hang out online as much as I once did in the earlyish-adopter days of GEnie and CompuServe and whatnot, but in the few places I do still frequent I haven't seen very much discussion of the fiftieth anniversary of TOS.

I've found something to like in all of the TV incarnations of Star Trek (with the exception of Voyager, which set my teeth on edge in every possible respect right from the first ep and essentially spoiled all my fun with respect to Trek). The other day, for example, I rewatched "In the Pale Moonlight" (DS9) for the first time in many years, and I was reminded again how very good the writing was on that series.

Not much appeals to me about the film reboot, though I don't hate that universe. I just haven't connected much with the characters--except, oddly, with Chris Pine's version of Kirk, who is appealing.

Evidently we'll soon have a broadcast or streamed version, so the universe lives on and, mostly, prospers. I just wish I could feel strongly about it again.

ETA: I was as much in love with the precepts of the Trek universe as I was with the personalities of the Trek characters. The imaginary zeitgeist hit all the marks for me. The spirit embodied in Trek was the spirit embodied in Suzette Haden Elgin's filksongs: hope, altruism, integrity, curiosity, the ability to learn from mistakes. If only it were all true.

Well worth reading:

Seanan McGuire on fan fiction

The comments are interesting. I can understand why some authors are uneasy about someone re/writing their characters in their universes. Writing a fic based on a TV series or a movie seems somehow qualitatively different from writing a fic based on a novel or a short story. I haven't been tempted to write fanfic based on a work of printed fiction (though I've certainly appropriated specific concepts from printed Trek fic in my stories, and I've tried to be conscientious about acknowledging the sources). I haven't really thought through why this should be so. I feel quite protective of "my" characters (that is, the on-screen characters as they are portrayed in my stories), and I would be nervous about a writer I didn't know wanting to write or rewrite them. But I'd be pretty intrigued if someone wanted to make a video of, say, "Done." Somehow it's important to me that the fanfic interpretation be in a different medium, but I'm just not sure why it's important.

Writing fanfic was excruciatingly hard work for me, but man oh man it was also fun. Unspoken Truth was the first fiction I ever wrote, and I didn't write it until I was well into midlife. As I've mentioned before, I earn my living by writing (under another name, and in a field very different from science fiction). Not once have I had the desire to write science fiction for money, and not just because I'd have to write (and oh, yes, sell) a gazillion SF books before I'd come close to earning what I earn at my regular writing job. Pro authors have to travel, meet deadlines, produce output on demand, and cater to publishers' wishes. I have to do all those things all week, and I definitely don't want to do them on weekends. (I never wanted to write pro Trekwork-for-hire for the obvious reasons: I'd heard plenty about the contractual arrangements from a few of those who'd done it.)

Fanfic allowed me to have fun without obligations. I could say anything about, or do anything I wanted with, the characters and universes that I loved. I could speculate to my heart's content about politics and religion and history and personality, and no one except my readers was going to give me a hard time about it.

I recently revisited some of my own work for the first time in a number of years, and it both pleased and saddened me. Pleased because I thought that, on the whole, the stories held up reasonably well (though the temptation to edit was strong, I resisted it); saddened because I miss that time and the whole fanfic experience so much. I'd love to get that special feeling back again, but after 10 years I'm pretty sure that's not likely to happen. I know when and why it disappeared (one word: Voyager), but that's a subject for another post, maybe.