Coming off the tail-end of sickness. Could have gone into work today but there were some after-effects which...well, never mind. But I thought I'd better stay close to home. Which is not good in terms of sick days, but whatever. I have tunnel vision right now, cultivated, because if I actually stopped to think more than a day ahead, I'd be freaking out. I have to buy a new car, for one. The mechanic who was going to ready my current car for emissions testing told me there was nothing they could do with it. At this point, I know my odds elsewhere of finding someone to sign off on it would be just as poor, and that I should face up to the fact that the car is actually becoming dangerous to drive. God. I'm going to have to try and find a car that I can pay for with what funds remain left on my credit cards because I can't afford a monthly payment.

Wait. Note. Must stop talking about money. And my car. It's boring and I'm depressing myself.

Finally made it through a blog circuit for the first time in days. I have in my notes from weeks past a whole long list of entries I was going to link to and echo, and there are blog links I need to add. And now there are some new threads I could riff on. But I don't have the brain power to do any of this. Let's face it. I'm beyond boring right now. Look for more boredom here in days to come.

Didn't watch the Oscars. Don't give a flaming crap. Am trying to think of the other things that typically sweep people up, which I have no time for. I didn't get caught up by LotR, for one, whereas everyone else I know has seen it anywhere from three to thirteen times. Once was enough for me. And so now the convergence of LotR and the Oscars. Yes, Ian is a fine actor. Rah, Ian. But am I the only one who thought he chewed the scenery a bit in LotR? Unpopular opinion, I suspect.

I have a tendency to monomania. And when I do get caught up, I tend to have zero energy for anything else. When I'm sitting around with friends who have a wide variety of interests--and I know some eclectically inclined, well-read, well-educated fans--I feel like you could bind my focused fan-brain in a nutshell, and there'd be room left over for a sofa. A typical fan friend: writes, vids, reads literary fiction, reads non-fiction, studies history, collects and reads comics, can 'speak' six fandoms fluently, knows the names and resumes of a hundred offbeat character actors, can discourse on anything from Tolkein trivia to the insignia of Napolean's army, can weigh the merits of one sophisticated vid technique against another, and delineate the rise and fall of DC comics. (Or whatever.) And then there's me. I'll just be over here, zoning on Buffy.

It's like...in terms of scholarship, say there are two types of mind--the mind that encompasses and synthesizes a vast, diverse world of thought; and the mind that studies one species of bird, say the redwing, down to its pin-feathers. I'm more of a pin-feather person. Except not quite. I don't have enough force of will, the drive, to even be the definitive Buffy fan. The pin-feather mind, despite its apparent narrowness, still has a broad grasp. Like, if you know only redwings, you at least know everything about redwings. Whereas I skim across the Buffy fandom, to a great degree, in order to write. I don't watch eps in a scholarly way, taking detailed cross-referenced notes on the characters, whether or not they like peas or history. I probably overlook opportunities for nuance. I am conscious of fudging stuff I know I could do better, e.g., magic. I could take the time to make Willow's magical knowledge come across as learned and sophisticated, the incantations more linguistically or Wicca-ly accurate. I could build a 'better' universe. I choose not to, really. I choose to write fast and loose, because I've alway gotten bogged down before on details, on lots of research, and I want to stay away from that. And because I think fast-and-loose is, to some degree, the BtVS idiom--in some ways necessarily, because of the medium's constraints (TV). And so if I stay in that idiom, it rings the chimes. That's a goal in itself. But it's easy for me to imagine a story that (with the potential inherent in writing) goes far beyond what BtVS can do as a TV show or the kind of thing I'm doing now, a story that brings depth and a different scope to it--draws in history, creates a more complex metaphysics, makes use of occult resources for versimilitude. Has deeper emotions, even, more complex and faceted rendering of characters.

And I say all this with, I guess, a bias toward realism that lurks in my psyche even when that's not my chosen style. Maybe we're always biased to favor what we feel inadequate about. I feel like I have no real knowledge or experience--as a person. As a person, I feel wholly inadequate. I've had no real life, my emotional life is anemic, my brain itself is underfed because I shrug off any real study of the world. Instead, I'm a faker. A forger. A pastiche artist. I pick up ('steal' or 'appropriate' in a postmodern sense) cheap glittery bits here and there--words, thoughts, ideas--and assemble them into an illusory surface. I do make original works, but at times it feels like puzzle piecing to me, or like a very conscious form of acting. Almost every feeling I write into a story? That's me faking it. Any apparently tossed-off knowledge in a story that makes you think I'm well-read? Faked. Tara's herbs, for instance, in the last story. I don't know anything about herbs. I just did a web crawl and found some appropriate herbs and dumped them in. And that's all that's necessary for that to work in the story, for most readers. But if there was no Internet, I'd be a much crappier writer. At least, I wouldn't be able to hide my paucity of learning in a dazzle of words. When I think of all those real writers, publishing literary novels, who draw on their own actual knowledge and experience--I feel like the biggest fucking sham on the planet. Which is perhaps why I hide in fan-fiction instead of trying to publish.

Maybe some of them are fakers too. But strictly as a reader, it doesn't look that way to me, you know? And some of them aren't. Some of them really are better. Better writers, better people.

So anyway, here is me ripping aside the curtain for you, for whatever that's worth. No agenda really, in doing so. Frankly, I don't even know where all this came from, because I had no intention more than writing a paragraph-long placeholder entry today. I think it's just one of those core-dumps that occasionally happens. I mean, this is an old theme for me, replayed. I've said stuff like this before. This particular set of worries is part of the framework of my writerly mind. Neurotic underpinnings.

You might think I'm in some bummed place from all this, in terms of writing. But I'm not. I'm all charged up about the noir. After finishing last story, I had a bunch of ideas about arcs to come. Last night my brain was in a furor and I could hardly get to sleep. One was a really exciting idea--but as soon as it occurred to me, I thought: "Shit, I'll be Jossed." Suspect it's something they might do at the tag end of this season. And I won't be up to that point in my series before the season ends. Oh well. We'll see. I could be very wrong. Writing fan-fiction for a live show is a roller-coaster ride.

posted 3.25.2002 @ 10:44am -- right-click here to grab a link