scrubjayspeaks

Challenge #12: resurrect an old meme. Have fun with it! Which is the goofiest meme you can think of? Put on your party hat and be silly!!

Ha! Ah, I have a few askbox memes still saved in my tumblr drafts folder from several years ago. Some of the writing related ones sound fun, but they seem to favor people with a large body of work from which to be drawing answers. Others are more along the lines of icebreaker questions, which I have...mixed feelings about in brickspace. Online's okay though.

I pulled a few from the list of suggestions, though. Under the cut due to length:

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Challenge #7: In your own space, create your own challenge.

Make some fannish food! Lots of fandoms have glorious food embedded in the canon or the fanon--hobbit meals for LotR viewing parties, movie night snacks in Avengers Tower, or attempts to reconstruct a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and survive the experience. So make something inspired by your fandom and post about it--pictures definitely a bonus. And hey, if your granola bar is cosplaying as lembas bread today, that totally counts too.

If you can't make something right now, consider posting about your favorite fannish cookbook or recipes. It's a work night, so I can't cook at the moment myself. But I love my copy of Dinah Bucholz's Unofficial Harry Potter Cookbook, which has a recipe for cauldron cakes (pancakes) that I make when I really want to get fancy in the morning. And the Skyrim cookbook I got from the library was enough fun, I think I need to get a copy for myself.

And finally, if cooking isn't your thing but eating is, just tell me about the fictional food you would most want to feast on if you had the chance.

If you do this challenge in any way, I'd love for you to comment here with a link to your post so I can see!

Challenge #4: In your own space, create some goals.

Hmm... I usually do a fair bit of goal setting at the start of the year. Or, well. Not necessarily goals, per se. Assessment. I don't do New Year's resolutions, but I do like to see where my projects are at and spend at least a little time thinking about where I'd like to head.

This year--or more accurately, after *last* year--that feels presumptuous, to put it mildly. Imagine the wild hubris of thinking things will be able to happen according to plans. With the added time and energy constraints of work kicking off the year with absolute madness, I haven't really done any thinking, let alone planning.

One thing I've found works for me, though, is tracking. It's not setting a goal, merely recording what happens for a given metric. In practice, though, monitoring a thing tends to result in my doing more of it. To that end, I'm keeping track in a little spreadsheet of all the books I read this year.

My reading habits are so sporadic, trying to set a specific goal for number of books/pages/whatever in a year would be an exercise in random guessing and futility. But if I just keep track of what I read and when I finish it, I'll probably end up making it through more books than I otherwise would.

One thing I would like to do this year, but which is so lacking in concrete plans as to hardly qualify as a "goal," is get my various (nearly) finished drafts posted. I've got a sequel to an MCU fic that has been written for the last...uh...five years? It just needs revision, and I'm not even sure it needs a particularly heavy hand on that count either. (Depends on how perfectionist I'm feeling, I suppose, which is currently rated at "five years' worth" of perfectionism, so.)

I've also got an original piece that, long story short, has been professionally edited, has cover art made, and is two-thirds of the way coded. I just need to finish the layout for the pdf version and upload the blasted thing. For money! A thing I theoretically do! Somehow!

I do have one, tiny, formal goal for this year. I want to take more pictures. I'm absolutely rubbish at managing to drag out my dSLR, even though I really enjoy using it. There's a decent camera on my new tablet, though, and I have that thing with me much of the time. (I don't have a smart phone, so I've never really gotten into the modern habit of snapping shots of everything around me.)

So my goal is to take one picture a day. Doesn't matter what device I use, what it's of, or if it's even remotely worth looking at. The sole requirement is that I point a lens at something and make the shutter operate at least once.

On the same principle as the tracking, though, I'm hoping that just forcing myself to think about something on a regular basis will indirectly get me doing it more. In this case, I might remember to get my digital camera out more often than at first frost, birthday beach trip, and Halloween, my traditional three times for remembering to take real pictures.

Snowflake Challenge! A thing I definitely did not forget existed until I started receiving new post notifications again! Yay!



Challenge #1: In your own space, introduce yourself!

I'm reusing last year's intro, mostly to save compiling all those links again!

The Basics: I'm Joyce Sully, aka freshbakedlady. (They/them pronouns, please.) I write fic and record podfic, not as often as I would like. I also publish original fiction; some of it is free. I'm chronically ill. I have a lot of animals and even more plants. I have a day job in manufacturing, and I used to work in a restaurant.

I'm on tumblr, where I mostly reblog photography, social commentary, weird stories, and fandom stuff.

I'm on dreamwidth, where I mostly post microfiction, art and photography, life updates, and fandom commentary.

I'm on AO3, where I mostly post traumatized superheroes, found family, and hurt/comfort.

I'm technically on twitter, where I mostly don't do shit because twitter is terrifying.

I'm on my own website, where I mostly sell original fiction.

Fandoms: I've accepted that my fandoms are, for now at least, mostly in cryostasis. I read very occasionally, I make sure I do one podfic a year, and I trust that I'll get active again when the time is right. So the following list is fandoms in which I am some level of conversant, even if I'm not active in any of them just now.

MCU, Teen Wolf, Yu Yu Hakusho, Gundam Wing, Stargate Atlantis, Harry Potter, Supernatural (early seasons only), Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Sailor Moon, The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings, Leverage, Losers, Mad Max: Fury Road, X-Files, Sherlock Holmes (various iterations), Captive Prince, Jurassic Park/World, Pirates of the Caribbean, Good Omens, Studio Ghibli movies (various), Pokemon, The Old Guard (the new kid on the block)...

It occurs to me, looking over this, that I engage with meta a lot more these days than I used to and more than I engage with anything else. That list has a lot of entries for which I have read hardly any fic, but I can think of multiple pieces of meta/commentary that really excited me when I encountered them. I live for LotR meta on tumblr, frex. I do love me some media analysis.

I should look into making audio versions of entertaining meta...hm...

Challenge #9: In your own space, promote at least one canon that you adore (old, new, forever fandom).

Yu Yu Hakusho (sometimes translated as or appended with Ghost Files or Poltergeist Report, which is a hilariously misleading attempt to convey the supernatural aspects of this world): technically classified as a martial arts anime, but not so you could tell by looking at the crazy, more of an action/adventure with supernatural creatures, team as family, and all the hurt/comfort you can stand.

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Challenge #7: Promote/Rec/Sing the Praises of Yourself!

Well, I've previously introduced the various places my writing is available and promoted the work I most want attention for. Soooo...

I'm never very good at this sort of thing. Lately, the thing I take the most pride in, the thing that I can't really deny even when I'm feeling down on myself, is this: I try really hard. I'm reasonably clever, and I learn anything anyone cares to teach me, and I just...keep showing up. That's what I hold onto. Just...keep showing up, pay attention, and things will work out somehow.

Challenge #4: In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

For the new year, I did copperbadge's Four Royal Advisors tarot spread, which is a monstrosity using the entire 78-card deck and a not insignificant quantity of floor space. I use this largely as a tool for self-reflection--a way to consciously know what I know.

One of the major takeaways I got from it this year was "fucking finish something for once???" (The other was "have you considered calming your tits?" in the emotional stability department. The cards seem...vexed by my life choices.)

This is not a surprising message to get from my unconscious, the universe, or the gods. I have a professionally edited story ready for self-publication, complete with commissioned cover art, if I would just. do. the fucking file formatting??? I have a novel draft printed and sitting next to my computer, silently judging my failure to revise it. And so on.

So my goal for this year is to finish what I've started. I'm not forbidden from starting new things, theoretically anyway. But the goal is to finish more than I start.

In terms of fannish activity, I've got an MCU story that has been in various stages of drafting for...something like five years. (No, it is not long enough or complex enough to warrant that kind of timespan. Just no.) Even if it is the only story I get out this year, I want it cleaned up and posted just so I can say I finally got it off my plate.

2020: Fucking Finish It

Challenge #2 In your own space, talk about your fannish history.

I suppose my fannish history looks a lot like that of other people in my age bracket--(mid-to-late) 80s brats--insofar as I first got meaningfully involved as a tween, there was a lot of anime influence, the college years were pretty dry, and adulthood brought a renewed and broadened interest. Oh, and being fannish and being queer ended up inextricably linked. This, as far as I can tell, is not an unusual trajectory.

I was present on a lot of the early internet platforms, but a) my timing usually brought me there just as that platform was fading, and b) I was almost always a lurker more than anything. So while yes, I was there, Gandalf, for things like egroups and webrings, the geocities era of websites, livejournal and ffn, it always seemed to be the last days before the fall of Rome. And I didn't have any significant interactions online. (With the exception of a furry-adjacent Yahoo group, the less said about which, the better.) I taught myself HTML to code a Yu Yu Hakusho fansite that no one, as far as I know, actually visited.

In hindsight, it occurs to me that I was...not completely hopeless, considering I really was out there in the goddamn Wild West, teaching myself coding and design and image editing just because it was fun.

I was lucky to have a brickspace group of friends who shared my fandom interests, so there was a lot of printing out stories we wrote and passing them around at school and such. Sailor Moon and Gundam Wing and Yu Yu Hakusho were more than fandoms; they were a kind of social structure to build my life around. We fit ourselves into our shared fandoms as a way of relating to each other. Because god knows, we were some awkward pups back then and needed all the help we could get.

Perhaps that's why, actually, the college years largely dried up my fandom connections. I lost contact with all but one of my high school friends. Fandom become something...preserved, for me. Trapped in amber. Read the same fic from a decade earlier. Live in nostalgia. There were only a handful of active authors I read during those years, and fandom very much felt like something Other People did and I merely observed.

Then I ended up in the Avengers fandom, circa 2012, and suddenly things were ALIVE again. I liked so much of what I was seeing, and I read voraciously. It was one of those rare bits of luck that life throws my way, to counteract my generally cursed status, because then my life fell apart in 2013. Fandom was the only thing keeping me alive for a year and a half.

And I got lucky again, because tumblr was the place to be at that moment, and it was a low-impact way of actually engaging. I had never had any fandom platform where interaction seemed within my capacity. (See above re: awkward pup.)

I know tumblr has some serious problems. I know it's fashionable to shit on it. Valid. But you know what? I never would have had the guts to leave comments or send messages or post fic again or collaborate on podfic, if not for that first baby step of liking a Clint/Coulson gifset someone else had reblogged. I wouldn't have the friends I have now.

So. Let's hear it for low-impact options and easy entry points.

While my reading has not dropped off quite as sharply as it did in college, I still think I'm in one of those lulls again. I haven't been writing in fandom for a few years now. Podtogether gets me one new AO3 entry each year, but that's been it. I read a couple people, mostly friends. Sometimes I worry that I'm broken, that my fannish impulse has gone fully and forever. But then I look back at the peaks and troughs of fandom across a couple decades for me, and I see that nothing is new in the world.

I'll come back eventually. I'll sync up again. It'll be at exactly the right time. It'll be in exactly the right format. That's how I'll know it's time again. And it'll be fun. And it'll be worth the wait.

Day 2

Rec at least three fanworks that you didn’t create. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I had originally planned to do a nostalgia rec set, but that rather came apart on me. So here: have an assortment of things I have liked with commentary.

Apocalyptic, by Grable424 & djcprod (fanvid, multifandom): the apocalypse should probably not make me feel so pumped up, but this one does it. By the time it gets to the line of "we go forward," I feel like I have rediscovered a reason to live. (Even "Live. Breathe. Suffer." feels like a motivational moto.) I have a deep, badly scarred-up place in my heart for anything that can be described as "teeth-gritted determination." I hum the song to myself at work sometimes, thinking of this, when the bullshit level is particularly elevated and I need to keep my head above it.

Lights for the Emperor, by tend (fic, Yu Yu Hakusho, Kurama/Hiei): I need to reread this, but I'm sort of saving it for some misty spring day. That feels like the right sort of time to get cozy with this story again. (I mention all this to excuse my inability to give any kind of detailed synopsis.) I found this when doing an "I wonder if anything interesting is happening in my ur-fandom" search. And it was particularly lovely, with its nuance and its quiet and its difficulties, as a reintroduction as an adult to something I loved as a teen. Also, the world building aspect of Kurama performing traditions intended to cast out evil spirits--traditions that actually activate against him--was brilliant.

The last bit does have two fic recs, but it's actually a...concept that I'm recommending. The stories OK Computer by Speranza and Transfigurations by Resonant both have a DVD commentary version, here and here respectively. These are both solid nostalgia stories for me, this time more from the college years, I think. They both do fascinating things with world building, and story arcs, and identity, and the passage of time. I love even more the commentary versions, which is something I don't seem to see done anymore?

For OK Computer, the commentary is some great literary analysis, including some really interesting commentary on queerness in media. For Transfigurations, you have an author and a beta in conversation about the writing process, which--you have no idea how endlessly fascinating that is to me. When I reread either story, I prefer to read the commentary version. What one loses in immersion is, I find, made up for in complexity of engagement.

As I said, I don't really see this happening any more (the lj challenge community for it has long since died), but maybe I'm in the wrong fandoms for it these days? If anyone knows of individual fic or fandoms where this is being done, I would totally be willing to leap into a new fandom for this. Hell, even rec me old stuff with commentary versions that you find particularly satisfying--I won't turn my nose up at it.

Day 1

In your own space, talk about your Happy Place—the things that give you joy, calms you or keeps you sane. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.


If we're talking about physical spaces, it's my backyard. It's got two sections: the dog park and the orchard. The dog park has largely been taken over by the duck run. I keep a reclining chair out there in good weather, and I like to sit and read. It's got the best view of the sky, so I hang out there for stargazing. The orchard (and vegetable garden) has a swing to sit in instead, and it is, ironically, my dog's preferred place to run around. I try to remember to go out to the yards when I'm sad, because it always makes me feel better. Sunlight and breeze and growing things, happy animals and books.

For metaphorical happy places, I guess it would be...designing. Which is a very vague word, but I can't figure out how else to express what I mean. I like the organizational stages of writing a lot. I like to plan out patterns for crocheting (though my skill at this is...debatable). I like to organize spaces in a way that optimizes their layout for their intended purpose. I like to make things make sense, I suppose. And that goes into a lot of the things that I enjoy doing or the aspects of things that I find most rewarding.

It's something that I've never entirely known how to make use of, beyond planning out my own projects and spaces. It seems like the sort of skill that would be in demand? In any case. I love the feeling that comes when I have correctly sorted things and laid them out, literally or figuratively, in a way that makes best use of them.

(Y'all should see the note cards I make when planning long stories to track themes and character arcs. I love me a repeating pattern!)

This--fostering happiness--is actually something that I am working on currently: identifying real sources of calm and renewal and happiness, as opposed to sources of...numbness. As much as I like cooking, frex, most cooking videos are "switch off the brain because it is doing a bad" items. Which has its value, granted, but. Sometimes it's hard to tell what is genuinely joyful and what is merely an analgesic.