serakit

See, the real reason to download one's fic locally is so that you can still reread your comfort fic when AO3 is undergoing supposedly ideologically-motivated DDoSing.

AO3 seems to be targeted more and more of late, and while I'm very much on the "unrestricted content" side of the current internal politics mess, the people who think something that size needs to professionalize and see if it can have a couple of paid staff members with experience in nonprofits are not wrong.

Have y'all heard that story of the pottery class where they told one group of students they only had to produce one bowl at the end of the semester but their entire grade was going to be based on that one bowl, and the other group of students they would be graded solely on the total weight of pottery produced at the end of class? The students being graded on weight produced better pottery, because the first group spent a lot of time theorizing about the perfect bowl, while the second group just... made a lot of bowls and got better for the practice.

I think this is what I'm getting out of the fanfic.

Because I have as of this moment a total of 44,553 words in Escapees or Exiles, written over the span of approximately three months, most of it written very rapidly and without the kind of care and attention to the exact wording or to editing afterwards that I put into my original fiction. This is just having fun. A detailed plot, sure, and a lot of small details mentioned that come up later (seriously, offhand mentions are usually going to be relevant later), but I'm not putting that much effort into the sentence-level prose.

Yet the sentence-level prose gets noticeably better as the series goes on.

I also have a much stronger and more coherent sense of an original story I've been trying to write for several years now. I think I may actually finish it this time. Before the deadline of the thing I want to submit it to, even. (I can even point to the specific scene that led me to figuring out how to write this story-- the flashbacks in "Collateral Damage," where I spent quite a while trying to figure out how to do the flashbacks such that they didn't interrupt the scene, eventually hitting on the interleaved mix in the finished story that has them add to the chaos rather than interrupt it.)

And I'm getting better at trusting the process--trusting the story will go where it needs to go even if that means that even my very rough outlines entirely disappear.

I don't think I quite believe the "you need to get a million words out before producing good words" chestnut, because I sold the very first thing I ever submitted anywhere and started selling things somewhat consistently fairly soon after I started taking it seriously. (The several-year gap between that first sale and the subsequent ones is a time I was neither writing nor submitting.) I also don't think it's just about getting words out, because I've attempted NaNoWriMo just for the sake of it without great inspiration or ideas and it didn't have this kind of effect on my writing.

I think it has to be a story you care strongly about telling. I really want to tell the story we're reading in EoE; I saw someone else write a concept I love and was seized with the desire to try my hand at the premise, and then, as my writing often does, it developed into a much more complex story than I originally conceived-- but it's very much a story that I'm eager to tell, with relationships I'm eager to explore. (I'm delighted to be hitting the start of the series arc in the next story... and yes, this does mean I spent almost 45,000 words just setting up character relationships, setting, and backstory. Oh, fanfiction, I delight in such freedom.)

I think it being a story I want to tell is what lets it improve my writing. It's not just about words on the page. It is never just about words on the page.

Every single copyedit I have ever received is primarily a list of all the ways I have misused commas.

Which is fine, that's what the copyedit is for (and all this repetition is improving my ability to catch it myself before I submit things); I'm just amused every time I open a new one and it's like "ah, yes, another list of commas."

I don't think the stim toy I want exists.

Which is to say, I want something roughly the size and texture of a Werther's Original that won't break when I bite down on it. (And isn't, y'know, candy--Jolly Ranchers don't break when bitten and last quite a while but that's still floating around sucking on hard candy all day even when I could eat them.)

Biting stim toys exist, yes, but I've yet to encounter anything with the correct size and texture.

Apparently I am going to receive comments to the effect of "but it's Star Trek technology; why has he not just had transition surgery yet?" on every installment where the protagonist being trans becomes plot-relevant.

Now, I could give a whole bunch of Watsonian reasons for that, some of which are going to come up at later points in the story. "Because he's genetically engineered and the surgical team looking at his DNA would probably reveal that" is an obvious one that anyone familiar with canon should be able to work out for themselves. As is "Not everyone wants transition surgery."

But the actual answer is "Because that's not the story I want to tell." It's less interesting. There's less to explore. It means I don't get to play with all these layers of trust and fear and someone unexpected discovering and keeping your secret and that's the first hint that your complicated relationship is going to have caring at the root of it all. It means I don't get to contrast the two secrets he's keeping about himself (his transition and being genetically engineered) and the different ways they isolate him from the people around him and what happens when he finally meets someone he can trust with both things. (A friendship I am so looking forward to writing and sharing.) It means I don't get to have the planned installment about the problems of getting T on a space station run by a fascist dictatorship, which is going to have huge ramifications for the long-term plot.

There's actually quite a bit less story if he can have the magical perfect surgery and be done with it.

Fanfiction is a gift. I've written, over the course of the last three weeks, 20,000 words of an AU that not that many people write but a lot of people love. For free, for fun. This kind of thing makes me not want to write it, delays my working on it until I can calm down again. Because this is supposed to be fun.

It's a big archive. There's a lot of stories out there if you don't like mine. Go read those.

I'm not going to justify that this is the story I want to tell.

I posted a fanfic!

This is, mind you, *not* the epic I have been alluding to; this is something that will probably wind up being similar in length but is a series of separate stories in the same universe with a general arc. Which means I can post things as I write them (and write them as a break from larger or more pressure-filled writing projects).

What is it fanfic of, you ask? Deep Space Nine fic (I know, blast from the past) featuring the premise of "What if Dr. Bashir got outed as an augment partway through the Academy, had to flee the Federation, and eventually wound up on Terok Nor before the Cardassians left?" This story starts immediately after his actual escape; we'll be settling into Terok Nor by the end of this fic. (And meanwhile y'all can amuse yourself playing "spot the foreshadowing.")

Thus far I've only encountered one other person playing with this premise and you can see the link to her thing in the "inspired by" section at the top of the page. I am kind of hoping if I join her this might turn into A Thing and attract more writers. In the spirit of both "two cakes" and "be the fic you want to read."

Convenient local bakery is closing soon. Consequently, the cookbooks they're selling are 20% off. This of course attracted my collector's acquisitiveness when I stopped in for a bagel and found out they're closing.

Back in the days when we could still attend the Havard Bookstore Warehouse Sale in person, Mathfriend instituted a rule that I have to actually open and look at the recipes in any cookbook before I purchase it, which actually did result in my changing which cookbook I was going to buy this time-- the pie one was full of fruit pies I can't eat and not much else. Meanwhile a book of Southern baking wouldn't ordinarily catch my attention, but I picked it off the shelf to skim because it was there and I was waiting for my bagel, and wound up purchasing it primarily on the strength of a recipe for sticky pecan rolls that can be made in less than half a day. (This is surprisingly difficult to find.)

I will report back once I actually use it for something.

A while back I read a whole bunch of histories of the 2008 financial crisis from different perspectives-- basically biographies of specific banks plus one on the hedge fund people who actually made money. The common thread in all of them was overexposure plus being very, very leveraged.

So I'm now reading When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management, which is about the 1998 financial crisis which resulted in LCTM getting bailed out in a move almost identical to the 2008 one. It is fascinating how much this book resembles the histories I read of the 2008 crisis, right down to derivatives being mentioned frequently. If one ignores the years and names, they could be histories of the same events. Including that the problem always seems to be giving one guy, or group of guys, sole control of enough capital to break the firm if it goes badly. And this also set the stage for 2008, as the lesson everyone else took from this was "the government will bail you out if you mess up."

And timing thing I had not realized: Glass-Steagall was repealed in the immediate aftermath of this escapade. Which raises a number of questions about the judgment of everyone involved, since they'd just had an extremely dramatic example of what kinds of disasters investment banking could cause.

A con report! Which is the only one I've had since last year's Mystery Hunt report. Depending on COVID numbers I may get myself a really good mask for Readercon and make sure I step outside every time I take it off, whether for breaks or to eat or drink, because oh how I miss conventions.

Mystery Hunt was in person this year, although only something like a quarter of the participants chose to attend in person. One consequence of the pandemic is much better support for remote teams, and much better support on our team for having a lot of remote solvers even when there's a core on campus.

This was also my first Mystery Hunt where I had neither Friday nor the following Tuesday off (usually I have both), which I will remedy next year because I want to be there for the beginning and also Hunt is exhausting-- though normally I have more time to recover because normally the coin is found on Sunday, HQ closes, and continued solving becomes somewhat more desultory and I start paying a lot less attention. Then again, if I had to miss the beginning, this was probably one of the better years for it. (More on that later.) 

On a personal level, this was one of my less active hunts. I went into it already fairly drained and most of the early puzzles did not match my skills and background knowledge, although I did contribute words gained from a list of cluephrases. I very much wish Zamboni had been unlocked earlier when I still had brain-- having encyclopedic knowledge of the Zoombinis on which the puzzle was based, I had very solid ideas of where to start just at a glance; I just didn't have enough ability to think to follow through. But since the team skipped solving it altogether as low priority for progress, Mathfriend and I will have fun solving it together once the Hunt archive for the year goes live.

Which brings me to something I had been vaguely aware of but have now had brought home to me: only puzzlehunting once a year and not having a lot of familiarity with the basic forms of puzzlehunts limits my ability to contribute unless something crashes into my subject knowledge. There are a lot of basic forms puzzles can take and I don't know most of them-- but I was able to get a lot from Zamboni just by glancing at it, because I know every inch of that game. If I want to get better I need to practice more frequently, to at least learn the general forms. (Would I have gotten stuck on extraction if I'd had enough brain to do the puzzle? Absolutely, 100%. But I could have gotten much farther on it than I generally can on my own.)

Which brings me to the Hunt itself. I have... issues with this year's structure, which judging by the comments on Puzzlvaria were shared by a lot of the participants. The first and most glaring is that nothing seems to have been learned from last year, when the gating of a huge swath of the Hunt behind the Fruitaround resulted in quite a lot of time with nothing else open for many teams, leaving everyone staring at a puzzle they couldn't quite get past. In general, any kind of gating is a bad thing, because any team might get stuck on any given puzzle. Unless a team is close to completing the entire hunt, there should always be a variety of open puzzles. A lot of people were unhappy with Fruitaround and it was much discussed afterwards. This year the problem seemed to have increased rather than decreased, as there were several successive gates and in general things were slow to unlock... and the beginning was incredibly difficult. In general, you want to increase your difficulty as the hunt goes on, and you want to put your most interesting puzzles and round structures in the midgame.

They seem to have put the interesting round structures (and also the scavenger hunt, which... why?) at the end, much later than they should be. To give you an idea of how badly off their estimations of the difficulty level were, HQ was scheduled to close at 6 on Sunday. With the traditional "or until the coin is found, whichever is later," but the expectation is that someone will win the hunt by midday Sunday, some of the other top teams will have the chance to finish, and then HQ will close. "Whichever is the later" isn't really... supposed to come into play. Hunt was finished at 7:23 AM on Monday. Granted, if MIT had permitted people to stay all night as in days of old, this would likely have been a few hours earlier (since while solving can continue remotely while campus is closed, final runaround can't), but that's still way longer than it should take.

And I say that as part of a team that's fairly large and is usually in the higher echelons of the leaderboard. There is a trend in Hunt that's been noticeable even in the few years I've been solving, that it tends to increase in size with each year, landing you in a position where the team sizes have to rise to keep up, which seriously disadvantages the smaller student teams.... who are the ones actually associated with MIT. Puzzlehunting as a genre is getting larger and more complex as more people get into it and run things from it, which is fine, but I really do think Mystery Hunt needs a decrease in size and complexity to keep it fun and interesting.

Okay, this is unlikely to ever actually become a handed-down family recipe because I'm unlikely to ever be in a position to have children.

But Mathfriend observed a couple of nights ago that it's interesting how quickly we've codified what we were making for dinner into an "our thing."

Because this was very much not set out as a "let's cook a thing and it will be special and wonderful." This started out with "There's something called 'jowl bacon' in the monthly add-on specials section of the meat share" and he immediately jumped to "That's delicious! I mean, I've never had it, but the cheek is always a very good cut on any animal." So despite an annoyingly high price-per-pound (my add-on choices tend to fall in the "cheaper because scraps and offal" category), I bought some for us to play with.

What we produced with it was largely his doing and very improvised based on what was on hand or could be easily purchased, because that was during the era in which I had absolutely zero spare spoons for planning ahead. The bacon, fried potatoes, avocado, scallions, and a little bit of lime juice squeezed over it, all wrapped in a tortilla. It was very good and I decided we should do it again. So we did. And then we did it a third time.

Every few meat share deliveries, I will say "it's been too long since we've done this" and get another one, and it's become the big special meal we do together. (While there's generally a substantial delay between adding one to my share and the share delivery, and sometimes they're sold out, I generally try to add one anytime something very good or very bad happens.)

And after he observed he'd been making it up as he went that first time, I wound up thinking about it, "is this how heirloom recipes get started? Two people messing around in a kitchen and deciding something is good and we're going to keep doing it?"