bironic: Neil Perry gazing out a window at night (Default)
I wrote 4,000 words of story over the long weekend and felt good about it, even though I haven't been able to get back to it yet and it needs some rehauling.

I usually put off reading fic while I'm writing it, because if I didn't I would (a) lose faith in my own abilities, (b) start unconsciously mimicking other people's styles and phrasing, (c) get into passive rather than creative mode, and (d) not be able to stop reading anyway. The result was that I had a nice pile of things to read Tuesday and yesterday, and some of them were really good.

Some SGA recs - all slash except for the first one and sort of the fourth one, and a must-read for TNG fans: )

Oh oh! This awesomeness (actually entitled "Hold") by [livejournal.com profile] foreverdirt - a Rodney/John double sestina that is tightly constructed, hot as hell, and contains some beautiful phrasing. I was so incredibly thrilled to find out that she was partly inspired by An Unanticipated Side Effect of Dosing Oneself with Wraith Enzyme.... It sounds / like madness, letting himself feel / like this over a man who would burn / his life away on a dime. It's not. ...She hasn't crossposted anywhere; I hope she doesn't mind me reccing it here.

.

I swear I'm still a House fan. See, here's a rec: Paresthesia and Pain by the always excellent [livejournal.com profile] mer_duff (post-finale, House/Wilson friendship, pain as metaphor). It's just that I've been bookmarking rather than reading since the season finale.

.

I also swear that I can and will talk about more than fandom/fanfic (but not that I can start sentences with words other than "I"). I want to have discussions about things like the difficulty of writing PWPs, and just how much stupider a person becomes as a function of how long it's been since they left school (and by "a person," of course I mean "me"), and how hot Stephen Colbert was while summarizing the shortfalls of string theory before guest Brian Greene, and whether the career path I've selected for myself is the right one, and whether my Saturday would be better spent relaxing on the couch or going into the city to see Alan Alda play Richard Feynman followed by a session with feminist astrophysicist Vera Rubin, and. . . but tonight does not seem to be the right moment for it. *yawn*

I blame an overtaxed brain; I worked for 9 hours straight on a new project at work today after spending the last three-odd years learning absolutely nothing, and then got through a cassette and a half of Hawking's The Universe in a Nutshell audio book in the car. (No, he does not narrate it.) Picking up unfamiliar physics aurally, while navigating traffic? Not so much my strength.

I think I will go read about how Thoughts of death make us eat more cookies.

ETA: This is news? "The authors believe people with low self-esteem use consuming as a way of subconsciously escaping self-awareness, which is heightened by thoughts of dying." I've been consciously escaping painful awareness of mortality through (fiction) consumption for as long as I can remember.
bironic: Neil Perry gazing out a window at night (Default)
Anyone who knows anything about pursuing Master's or doctoral work in a field that might support a thesis on fanfiction, particularly fanfiction as text -- preferably English, as that's what my background is in, but also perhaps cultural or popular culture studies (e.g. Bowling Green U.), (new) media studies (though not so much in the vein of Jenkins' Comparative Media program at M.I.T., I don't think), sociology, gender or queer studies, interdisciplinary programs, etc. -- please, please, please email me, or drop a comment and I'll email you. Please. One of my plans for saving my sanity is to apply to programs in the 2008/9 school year -- I assume it's too late at this point for 2007/8 -- and I would really appreciate any advice you can offer in finding programs to apply to or people to contact. I have a couple of lists to start with, but they are rather meager. At this point I don't mind where the school is -- anywhere in the U.S., U.K., Canada, or, hell, Australia; you guys don't seem to have as many hang-ups about academic work on fannish subjects as we do here.

(More on this soon.)

Tags

Style Credit

Syndicate

RSS Atom
OSZAR »