Three more Snowflake days.

[slaymesoftly]

Catching up again! I think this is almost over. I'll be pretty pleased if it turns out I stuck with it and did every day.

Day 11

Share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Well, hands down it has to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It literally did change my life. I discovered fan fiction (something I’d not really been aware of before), and through that – first as an obsessive reader, then as a writer, and then as a member of a very active fandom -- I rediscovered a love of writing that I had when a child. I had to relearn things I should have already known about grammar and punctuation. (Did you know you can get a degree in English Lit without ever taking a class in grammar or punctuation? There’s an assumption, it seems, that you learned everything you need to know about it by the 9th grade and never forgot.), to the extent that I now make pocket money as an copy editor. Much of my free-time is filled with reading , writing, and talking about things that would have been mysteries to me twenty years ago. I also have to credit BtVS and the fanfiction associated with the show and its characters with giving me a much higher tolerance/understanding/knowledge of things I might never have been exposed to.
So, yeah. Big time changes!

Day 12

In your own space, create a fanwork. Make a podfic, an icon, a sketch, a meta, or a rec list. Arts and crafts. Cross stitch. Draft an essay about a particular medium. Put together a picspam or a fanmix. Write a review of book you love, a ship manifesto, a you-should-be-listening-to-this-band essay. Create something. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Ok. Not sure I can do this one. My only artistic contribution is writing. So it would have to be a meta (not in the mood, ATM), a rec list, or some other sort of essay. My contribution to fandom will probably have to be the next chapter of my current wip, which will probably go up in a day or so. Snowflake fail?

Day 13:
In your own space, set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Make a list.
Strike it off.

Argh – I’m not much of a goal setter. I’m more of a ‘I’d kinda like to do this, I wonder if I can’ kind of person.

Fannish – maybe try to have more output? Or not? Maybe just go quietly away unless and until something demands to be written? And not worry about having only four things to show for 2017?

Personal – Re the above fannish stuff that isn’t happening in the quantities that it used to, perhaps I’ll take a look at a few (very few) original things I’ve piddled at through the years and decide if I want to publish (or attempt to publish) them somewhere. One is a vampire short story that I could try to peddle to Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine or something like that. It's not completed, but I sort of know where I'm going with it. The other was an experiment in writing a romance for middle aged women. That grew out of an on-line class I took in which someone complained that in romance novels characters are always young and good-looking and why was that? There was conversation about how nobody would want to read about anyone so much like themselves because it’s all about the escapism, but some disagreed. Anyway, so I thought I’d give it a try, and I even ran it by one or two people who read romances (which I don’t – so it’s incredibly arrogant to think I could write one) to see what they thought. So there’s that. I’m not even sure what I would do with it, but who knows?

More personal – meh, the usual kind of goal- be more fit, lose 10 pounds. Doable, but hardly goals to set. More like goals to think about setting. LOL

Comments

Diebirchen, not anonymous!

[(Anonymous)]

Well, if you're older than dirt like I am, and you went to a solid working class / middle class grade school with strict teachers and had parents who insisted on doing well in school, you probably did learn what was needed to get by without embarrassment. But that's admittedly a lot of ifs. I edit too. For lots of folks, "me" vs. "I" is a mystery all unsolvable; "past" vs. "passed" is not on the radar, and "lain" and "swum" are not even English words. Parallel structure? Huh?!?

Re: Diebirchen, not anonymous!

[slaymesoftly]

I don't often have issues with vocabulary (or spelling - not that I'm great at spelling, but I know when it doesn't look right and I should look it up). Much of what I had to "learn" or relearn was stuff that I could have passed a test on at some point when I was twelve, but those classes weren't focused as much on writing well, as on just learning some basic rules. Working in a middle school and helping kids with their classwork was what brought all those rules back into my life and made me realize how sloppy some of my own writing had become. Some things just don't stick with you if you don't use them all the time. Which is particularly true of the skills needed to write fiction and dialogue. And if you're basically literate and don't make obvious mistakes in tenses and grammar, it may never become an issue until you're doing a lot of writing. There's a pretty broad gap between being able to write without looking like you never went to school, and knowing all the ins and outs of the less basic rules you need to be aware of to be an editor. Lack of embarrassment is a pretty low bar if trying to make something as correct as it's possible for a creative work to be.

[rahirah]

I've noticed that every time I resolve to work on something original I suddenly get ideas for fic, so either way, hopefully it will be a win.

[slaymesoftly]

LOL Well that's a thought Could be an unexpected side effect. ;)