nyctanthes

I will get to Challenge #6: Top 10 at some point. I want to talk about theatre I've seen, but that requires more time and thought than I currently have.

Also! Tomorrow! threesentenceficathon begins! (pleasepleaseplease let me inspired just a leetle bit...)


Challenge #7: Three Things I Like About Meeee

1. When I start something, I finish it. This can be bad (sunk cost fallacy), but generally (see below) is a plus.

2. I’m funny. For a while I worried that my humor was too off-the-cuff, and I couldn’t translate it into writing. But that’s not true! I rather enjoy reading my own stuff and LOL-ing at my occasionally frequently juvenile jokes.

3. I say the thing that everyone’s thinking but is afraid to verbalize. When I was younger, I was too blunt, and this honesty was often off-putting. As I matured, I learned to leaven the truth with humor, to manage my tone, to not make it a personal attack, which really, really helps.


Challenge #8: Creative Process

Rather than get into the weeds of my process, which aren’t that interesting, including to me, I’ll just say that, at a macro-level, what most drives my writing process is that when I draft something and determine it’s worth pursuing, I finish it. Once I broke my two-decade plus writing drought, the third piece of fanfic I wrote was a 86K word novel. Did it receive any comments or kudos as I posted it, chapter-by-chapter? Not really. But by god I was going to finish it. Not just finish it, but edit it structurally so that it flowed better. One of the last pieces of fanfic I wrote was an even longer, Nancy Wheeler from ST story which had a very limited audience and required a whole lot of research. Didn’t matter. I *needed* to get closure on it before I could start writing original fiction and apply to graduate school.

This is helping me now that I’ve transferred my creative energy from fanfic to original fiction. Folks, writing a novel is a giant fucking pain in the ass that I do not recommend. And unlike fanfic, I have no guarantees that someone will eventually read it and love it.* Having practice finishing large projects is very helpful (“I know I can do this!”), as is my bull-headed** determination to cross an item off my to-do list.

(For me!) finishing a project is one of the best ways to learn and improve. The sense of satisfaction! The confidence boost! Unparalleled.


* Which eventually happened with both my fanfic novels. Not many people, but I write for niche audiences. :P

** Did I mention that I’m a Taurus and was born in the year of the ox?

Challenge #3: Fandom Love Letter

A total cheat. This is not my love letter, but New York Times reporter Taffy Brodesser-Akner's. The entire article (sans photos) is behind the cut. It’s also HERE, hopefully as a gift link.

( Why on Earth Have I Seen the Same Broadway Show 13 Times? An Investigation )

Pets of fandom? Pets of mine? No can do. I don't have pets and my fandoms are, as far as I remember, animal free. I do have a pet (haha) theory about Chester, the Byers' now-you-see-him-now-you don't dog from Stranger Things, that I included in a fic. But I'm afraid it's not in the spirit of the challenge. :P

That said, there are animals in media that I had very strong opinions about as a child, that I wished could be my pets. So in no particular order...

My favorite fictional animals that I wanted to bring home and love and hug and call George:

- Balloo and Bagheera from The Jungle Book. (The 1967 Disney cartoon: accept no substitutes.)*

- Misty the pony from Misty of Chincoteague (Marguerite Henry, 1947). It's hard to pick just one fictional horse. A runner-up is Sham from King of the Wind. Another Marguerite Henry!

- Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, the grey mongoose from the eponymous short story in The Jungle Book (Rudyard Kipling, 1894).

- Duchess, Marie, Berlioz, Toulouse and (I suppose) Thomas O’Malley from The Aristocats. (Another Disney cartoon, this one's from 1970. I could make up an entire list of favorite animals from 20th century Disney movies.)

- The wolf pack from Julie and the Wolves, the rabbits from Watership Down, the rats from The Rats of NIMH. These are different from the above in that I didn’t want them as pets, I wanted to be one of their group.

These are all childhood favorites, so to round out the list, a recent favorite:

- Turbo Granny from the Dandadan anime! I won’t say more. IYKYK.



* I have a Mowgli icon that I need to upload...

April

Long and Short (fiction, non-fiction, poetry, comics):

Film:

Music:

TV


( March )

( February )

( January )

I’m sooo rusty at being fannish.

1. Dandadan. Earlier this year, the first season of this anime about battling spirits and surviving adolescence with the help of your sexy, kickass grandma and the weirdos you encounter and add to your found family along the way, went from “oh I’ll keep it on in the background,” to “I love it and am paying attention.” Fun stories, characters (girl protags with girl friends!), dynamics, and animation. Bonus: Kid 2 and I can watch together. We went to the movie (the first three episodes of S2) and earlier this week watched eps. 4-10. Only two more episodes of this season left? Wahhh!

2. In addition to Novel #1 and Novel #2, I’m playing around with a collection focused on mothers and daughters. I’d love to make it a hybrid collection: some short stories, a novella, some memoir-ish shorts, some essays that toe the line between fiction and non-fiction. I also want to put some straight-up fanfic in there, a la Carmen Maria Machado and her SVU novella (though imo it was one of the weakest stories in that collection.) To that end, I was excited when I came across this brief piece about the similarities between fanfic and litcrit, which in turn linked me to this trad published novella about Dan Humphrey from Gossip Girl being trans. I know nothing about the quality of the work, but am super interested in this aspect of the mainstreaming of fanfic. If they can do it, so can I?

3. In YKINMKATO news, months ago I read a good As You Are story. The micro-fandom of my heart, I haven’t found quality fic for it in years. Finally, someone wrote one. The catch, of course there’s a catch, is that this story has a feeding kink. Not. My. Thing. (I’m not sure I would have tried it if I read the tags, but I rarely read the tags before dipping in.)

And yet, despite the please-no-not-that-kink, despite the fact that I disagreed with the characterization of the leads, I really enjoyed it. I’ve read it more than once! Which goes to show that i) I love these characters and ii) if there’s a well-written story, and the author makes a good case for the choices they’ve made, I will read it. And rec it. Judging by the comments, several other people feel the same way.

I’m always happy to see writers who just go for it.

4. Heard good things about the anime of Apothecary Diaries, which IIRC is about a servant in a brothel solving mysteries, and will be checking that out.

5. Yuletide! I’m wondering what I might nominate. I’m totally out of practice at reading fanfic, so thinking about what I’d like to receive, that fits the cut-off of less than 1K works, is quite the head-scratcher.

Some ideas:
- Ash: A Secret History. After one thousand plus pages, what else is left to tell? Lots!
- subwaytakes: the instagram show with Kareem Rahma.
- The Great Gatsby: A while back, I said I wanted fanfic of Gatsby and his mentor who owned the boat. Now’s my chance?
- Two Lane Blacktop. This road movie is all vibes, and hence perfect for fanfic. I especially want to know more about The Girl.

No, not my micro-fandom. I feel too strongly about it. That would be setting up my YT writer and me for disappointment.

6. To close out, movies via letterboxd. One aspect of it that’s fun is that everyone on the platform displays, in their profiles, their four favorite movies. If you’re on instagram, letterboxd also posts videos in which people (mostly in the film industry but occasionally just folks like you and me) list their four favorites. A good way to find new movies.

My current four favorites are:
Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, Kim Ki-duk (2003). Buddhist perfection.
Consuming Spirits, Chris Sullivan (2012). I watched this on New Year’s Eve in 2021. As soon as I finished it, I watched it again. Here’s more on it (scroll down).
Minding the Gap, Bing Liu (2018). Y’all know I’m a sucker for coming of age stories. This one, and it’s a documentary to boot, is soooo good.
The Music Room, Satyajit Ray (1958). I enjoy tragedies, and stories of quiet, genteel decline.

Movies that might replace these one day:

Seven Samurai, Akira Kurosawa (1954). Enough said.
Trenque Lauquen, Laura Citarella (2022 & 2023). A multi-hour, Argentinian puzzle-box film with a fantastic script. Really unique and lovely. Highly recommended.
Yi Yi, Edward Yang (2000). The perfect family saga. Showing in theaters this fall. I’m so here for it.
Young Frankenstein, Mel Brooks (1974). Just thinking about this movie gets me cackling.
Before Sunset, Richard Linklater (2004). One of my favorite tropes (after years and years, meeting the one who got away) done just right.

What are your four favorites? What are your runners-up?

Zohran Mamdani!!!!!

My god, I needed something like this so bad.

First time in thirty years I've voted for a Democratic mayoral candidate without holding my nose.

Suck it, NY Times, and every establishment Democrat who supported that unmitigated, unrepentant, unqualified, abusive asshole Andrew Cuomo.

I did it! Omg am I tired.

Taught my last class of the semester on Friday. Still feeling warm and fuzzy from it. What good kids! They didn’t want the class to end. My two strongest students told me it was the best course they’d taken at [redacted]. While I took what they said with two teaspoons of salt, and a long side-eye at the state of teaching at elite American universities, I was also flattered by and grateful for the compliment. I put a lot of effort into the course, before and during the semester, and I’m glad it paid off. Now I’ve got a few weeks to think about some tweaks/improvements, keeping in mind that I cannot, will not, must not have a whole new set of readings. No more than half a dozen! I mean it, self.

I love short novels, novellas, long short stories, and it seems the students do as well. Ones I’m contemplating, that will complement the short novels/long stories (Termush, Sven Holm; Kick the Latch, Kathryn Scanlan; The Metamorphosis, Kafka; Elephants in Captivity: Part I, Rajesh Parameswaran; The Life Cycle of Software Objects, Ted Chiang) already on the syllabus are:

- Orbital, Samantha Harvey
- Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
- Waiting for a Hurricane, Margarita García Robayo
- Offshore, Penelope Fitzgerald
- Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter. Maybe I should just stick to her short fiction. Some from The Bloody Chamber?

(I’ll only take two or three of these…)

I also want to have a week, probably right before spring break, where they watch a movie or two. A couple I’m thinking about are Anatomy of a Fall (what a screenplay!) and Truth or Consequences (a speculative documentary).

*

No “best of” lists this year, alas. Next year! I should have the time. But here’s what I’ve been enjoying of late.

Ash: A Secret History, Mary Gentle. I’ve had this book for years, and was prompted to finally start reading it via network (an off-the-cuff “best of” list by sovay, I believe.) The e-version, naturally; it’s ridiculously long. I can see myself finishing it! Aside from Mervyn Peake, it’s been decades since I’ve read an epic fantasy that I haven’t quickly bounced off.

Self-Portrait As A Coffee-Pot. The South African artist William Kentridge’s ten-episode series on his creative process, filmed during covid. I’ve watched the first two episodes and am enchanted. Utterly delighted! My first exposure to the man and his work, and I’m so looking forward to learning/exploring more.

Diamond Jubilee, Cindy Lee. On a lot of best-of lists, I believe. Released without fanfare earlier in the year. I only found it in recent weeks, when it came to Bandcamp. Two hours of hazy, psychedelic, happy-sad dream pop.

*

Back to NYC on Saturday, then our giant Christmas Eve family get-together and, the next day, a trip with D and the kids to Paris! My first travel outside North America since March 2020. Then back to NYC and working on draft two of Novel #1, before heading back to campus the third week of January.

I’ve got an independent study in the spring with my advisor and want to send him 10-15 revised pages a week starting in mid-January. The thesis requirement in my program is small (sixty pages), but since I’ve got the whole thing drafted (a couple hundred pages), my goal is to have a complete re-draft done by the time I graduate in May, so I can - fingers crossed, knock-on-wood - fine-tune in the summer and query in the late fall/early winter. Possibly probably too ambitious a timeline. But my advisor is very practical about writing, as am I. It's better to aim for something sooner than start with "oh I need another two years..."

Two pieces of media that are providing solace, while also enabling me to grapple with the moment we’re in.

- Heather Cox Richardson: Election discussion with Jon Stewart. She’s so very thoughtful and knowledgeable and calm; Partner D has been reading her political-historical breakdowns, which come in the form of daily “letters,” for years. On the conservative side for sure, I don't agree with all her conclusions, and damn smart. (She calls herself an institutionalist, and I appreciate that immensely, as I consider myself one too.) She offers no hot takes on what just happened. The number of outlets and individuals that offer that is vanishingly small. Her "Letters from an American" are available (for free I believe?) on Substack.

- Jessie Gender, Aronock & Company: “On the Decaying Monomyth of Star Wars”. An almost six hour YT series on the Star Wars franchise, from the beginning to now.* I spent four and a half hours yesterday watching it, and was totally absorbed. A great examination of the Star Wars franchise's dependence on Campbell's hero's journey and how that (plus capitalism!) informs its politics: an endless, decaying circle of neoliberalism to fascism and back again. Which (surprise!) has a lot of resonance to American politics. I'm brought back to my class last year on futurity, and our collective inability to imagine a 21st century that isn't the 20th century lite. (Or for too many of us, pre-Voting Rights Act, pre-19th Amendment America.)

I am not fannish about Star Wars. I don’t watch Star Wars, with the exception of Andor. But these folks are fans, and this series is great. And now I have a few references re: fascism that I want to check out. Looking forward to watching their two-hour Andor video.

Time for coffee. Then work work. Then housework. Hopefully some swimming or yoga. It’s been a minute since I had time to do either of them.

Time to get on with it. And by it I suppose I mean life.

Hugs to you all. Keeping comments off for now, but I hope to be back soon with the spoons to converse.


* Discovered via a Discord rec. The series came out early this year.



ETA: One more link. Less on the comforting side, but helpful for those of us who want to refute ridiculous claims that Harris lost because of "identity politics." (Fuck you very much, New York Times op-ed page.)

Don Moynihan (a favorite, rec'd before, his Substack is free): Who is allowed to practice identity politics?

Seen on network: "Watching America cut its own throat."

Yup.

(Hello everyone. Sorry to break radio silence with this. Hope to be back soon with a sliver of something better.)