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remixredux08 is no longer anonymous. This year I wrote Mighty Dark to Travel (Full Fathom Five), in X-Men Movieverse. The story I remixed is Frosted World, by ms_jvh_shuh.

Reposted to my fic journal:
Mighty Dark to Travel (Full Fathom Five)
Fandom: X-Men Movieverse
Summary: After John is shot, Bobby loses control. (mid X2)
Character(s): Bobby/Rogue, Bobby/John
Word Count: 3333
Notes: I know medicine doesn’t work that way. Roll with the comic book science.

I really enjoyed writing this remix. The original story has several different povs, and I wanted to keep that but make it more explicit - really colour the situation differently in each part. So I added the perspectives of one of the cops who shot at Bobby, John, Rogue and Logan, and Bobby's brother Ronnie. I had the most fun writing the cop, an OC, and writing Rogue, who's in an ugly position in this story. The title comes from an old American blue grass song, and the funky remix title is of course from The Tempest.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that does fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong,
Hark! Now I hear them – Ding-dong, bell.

The idea being that the road that John takes in the film, and that Bobby considers in this story is (duh) a dark one to travel, and this story, with five different povs, goes fully five fathoms deep (in that direction), or attempts to fathom five characters. Not too corny, I hope?

I was also surprised, though not so surprised in retrospect, to find that musesfool was the author of Packing for the Crash (The Black Brothers Variations), the remix of my Salt the Earth. Go read Vic's story, because it's great. It's funny, something about it was so familiar, but I couldn't quite figure out what. ;)

In other remix-y news:

Hijack Me HP is THE BEST THING EVER. Well, you know. Here's the deal: ( Read more... )

I have, of course, subscribed to the feed and am waiting for a special and unique snowflake to fall into my greedy and corrupting hands. Mwa ha.

***

I made two Director of SHIELD posts to scans_daily and the comments were mostly free of Ironhate and Civil War wank. It's a Christmas (in spring) Miracle! What continues to bug me, is how hard I as the OP, have to work to keep everything cool when wank threatens to explode. I had a couple of moments of pure, concentrated Intarwebs WTFuckery and just managed to resist the urge to respond with a flame the size of Australia. The community does okay much of the time, but the hand of mod is imo, just a wee bit light. There are times when I just want to share my squee, and don't want to spend the next three or so days a) justifying my squee; b) defending people who share my squee; c) defending people who DON'T share my squee; and d) soothing the savage, mouth-breathing beasts.

No one's twisting my arm - I could technically post and run (and watch the wank roll in), but the whole point of posting to a comm, and not my own journal, is sharing the love. And that's hard to do when posters are calling each other out over a fictional political dustup that happened two years ago. Or questioning each other's morality, based on their taste in fiction.

Not to say that my behaviour is perfect in every which way. There was one post, a month or two back, where I responded to all the constitutionality-of-the-SHRA comments with "LOLZ!1!1111"until they stopped commenting. *g*

And not to say that this is exclusive to scans_daily, because I swear, it's like this almost everywhere online. One second you'll be talking about the latest issue of She-Hulk and the next, the thread's devolved into a panel by panel dissection of Amazing Spider-Man, issue number whateverthefuck, and what Peter said, what Tony said, what Luke Cage said, in a comic that was published TWO YEARS AGO AND HAS NOTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH SHE-HULK NUMBER 28. And ok, I think that's enough capslock rage for now.

So yeah, more modding on scans_daily. It would be good.

Feedback in May

fluterbev wrote an interesting post about feedback as currency. She's got an excellent look at how different the writing-feedback equation looks from the other side. Some writers view feedback as payment for a job well done. Bev says:

And few readers ever seem to express their giving of feedback in terms of it being payment. Fanfic is freely available on the net, and anyone can read it. Why, unless they have a particular investment in doing so, should readers pay for it terms of feedback? And if stories are read via fanzines instead of on the net, the reader has already paid a monetary sum to read it, so why should they pay again by sending feedback?

musesfool posted her views on feedback. Vic says:

But the fact of the matter is, no one is under any obligation to read, to finish, to like, or to comment on any piece of fan work they come across. It's really awesome that people do, and it can encourage writers/artists to produce more stories/art/whatever. But an obligation, as in, I created this and you must pay for it now since you read and enjoyed it? No. (The exception being gift exchanges where the fic/art/vid etc. was created for a specific person, often to their specific requests. Then there is an obligation, as there is with any gift, to say thank you, at the very least.)

And there's lots of talk about how we do this for free and don't get any compensation yada yada, and I... don't know that that's necessarily true. I get the compensation of knowing I wrote a story, I made a thing that didn't exist before, and 99% of the time, it's a thing that makes me happy. I post that thing because I hope it will make other people happy. Sometimes, it really does. Sometimes... not so much.

destina has a list of 23 Reasons Readers Don't Give Feedback. I like these ones:

22. Because they don't see your story as a gift to them, and they bristle at the notion they are somehow obligated to thank you in return. In fact? They probably think their feedback to you is the gift. And who's to say they are wrong? Not me.

23. They see writing feedback as a chore. Certainly writing a story can be a chore sometimes, for some writers; why would writing feedback be any different? If fandom is supposed to be about having fun, it makes no sense to do what doesn't make you happy.

There is so much confusion about the writing-feedback equation. Personally, I read so much more fic than I write and only feedback a tiny percentage of what I read. The reasons for that are aptly covered by those posts, but writers, make no mistake - you will never find a Unified Theory of Feedback, and you will never, ever find a reliable way to compel readers to post more feedback. And you should seriously stop trying. There's nothing more loathsome imo than attempts to make what is by nature a gift (produced freely, for free) into an obligation. You can't add on after the fact, a moral imperative to feedback, when it wasn't in the initial contract - you posted your fic openly, online, and perhaps requested feedback, but didn't require it. Therefore, you cannot position feedback as payment, obligation or imperative. It must be as much an unlooked for gift as the fic itself. I say must, because those demands for feedback-or-no-more chapters will always get some response, but are imo ultimately corrosive to the writer-reader relationship. Not only must the reader perform on command, but now the writer must too - having received feedback s/he must produce that next chapter, or renege on the fannish contract. And that's just fail.

Bev says that the reader isn't obligated to write feedback, unless s/he's personally invested in doing so, for whatever reason.

I am personally invested in writing feedback. I may not have been writing much of it lately, (for reasons that are unimportant at this juncture, or however the quote goes), but I enjoy giving feedback. I really like talking about fic. There aren't many places in fandom, particularly eljay fandom, where it's cool to talk about people's fic. There's some sort of invisible line between general meta, and discussing individual stories, outside of the writer's own forum. Comment threads are probably the best place on eljay to have in-depth fic-talk. I also really like talking fic with writers - finding out what went on behind the scenes, what their process was, that kind of thing. So feedback? Is win win for me.

As I said, I haven't been writing much feedback lately, but I've come into some free time and I'm setting a challenge for myself. Back when I was posting on Fiction Alley Park, we had this club where you set yourself feedbacking challenges, and then posted on the challenge thread, when, where and to whom you fbed. If it was more generally interesting fb, you might repost it for other people to read. The point was to a) generate fic-talk; b) share your appreciation with the writers; and c) engage in a little community development by getting some multi-directional conversations going. Oh yeah, and have fun. I don't know if this club still exists - it's been years since I posted at FAP - but while I participated, it was great.

I'm declaring the month of May to be my personal Feedback Challenge.

My goal is to write 30 pieces of feedback of 100 or more words, exclusive of story quotes.

I will post about my progress in this journal and tag the entries 'may feedback challenge'.

I might reproduce the fb here, if I think it would make for an interesting discussion, after asking for permission (as a courtesy) from the author.

This challenge isn't about paying fic writers back. It's about sharing my appreciation for their hard work, and indulging my interest in talking about fic.

I would be delighted if other people set themselves a Feedback Challenge, because I want to hear what other people have to say about fic. *I have a tiny flist, so if you think this is an interesting idea, or you think your flist would be interested, please R+R pimp.*

ETA for clarification: you set the terms of your own challenge.