the random ponderings of e. f. danehy

wherein she discusses such things as writing, fantasy literature & criticism, & nerdy popular culture (using much parenthetical commentary & tangential ramblings).

Category: media

My name is Erin and I’m a lurker.

Wednesday February 24, 2010

I admit it! I’m an lurker. A constant, avid lurker. This means I scroll through multiple outlets of social media including Twitter, Facebook, and several (dozen?) blogs on a regular basis, but I rarely (if ever) post in response to something, comment, or even @reply. Urban Dictionary has some interesting definitions for it, many of which apply to me.

I’m embarrassed!

I’m one of the only twenty-somethings I know who’s relatively shy about social media and meeting people via the medium of the internet. The weird thing is, this seems a bit off for my generation. I’m old enough to remember the Time Before the Internet but too young to have done much phone conversing with friends as a teen/college student — not when there was the beauty, speed, and simplicity of instant messaging, emails, chats, and social websites. (Though I’m too old to be an avid texter. Texts confuse me, mostly, and I am yet again ashamed to admit that.) So because of this, I have absolutely no qualms about lurking about the internet, checking up on friends and learning about new people.

In real life, however, I’m completely different. I can’t sit in a group of people I vaguely know and stay quiet (or at least, not for long). I’m probably too outgoing, sometimes — in that nerdy-awkward way — and when I describe myself as shy, many people who know me in real life laugh — laugh — because definitionally I’m not shy… except, apparently, when it comes to the internet.

Is this a bad thing, though? Perhaps. I follow and I have a really great sense of many people I’ve never met in real life via the medium, but because I don’t engage in a dialogue, they may not even realize I exist. But I’m also afraid, in this internet age of lower barriers to communication, of coming off as too pushy, crazy, or obsessive. (Which, admittedly, I know I may come off as if I really did throw myself into commenting to my heart’s content.) There’s a happy medium, and I’m sure I’ll ease into finding it, but I haven’t found it yet. Baby steps, they say, and that applies as much to this as to everything. I am trying, and I’ve been trying over the last few months, the last year, to really dig into the internet world. I’ll get there.

But until I ease myself into a more active internet social lifestyle, I’ll probably just keep lurking.

Baby steps. Baby steps.

2 comments February 24, 2010  /  categorized as: media
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Ponderings on Joss Whedon and writing for an audience

Saturday September 26, 2009

I’m a huge Joss Whedon fan and have been ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the series) changed my pre-teen/teen life. (He’s continuously impressed/inspired me, most recently with his Emmy-winning Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.) After last night’s excellent premiere of Dollhouse’s second season, I was perusing the interwebs and came upon this interview Whedon did with the LA Times. My favorite little bit of it was:

You have quite a devoted following. As you write, do you consider what your fans will think? Is that a consideration?
It’s a consideration, but it’s not the first one. The first one is ‘What’s cool?’ If I think something is cool, then other people will too, because I’m a fan. Something that makes me go ‘Ohh, tingly,’ that’s something that other people will share. I am the audience. When you’re thinking about the fans, you’re more thinking about ‘What do we not have enough of?’ and ‘Where do we need to be next, emotionally?’ But beyond that, you’re thinking ‘What makes me excited, what’s wrong with me, and how cool is that?’ It’s a playground.
You also think about the actors. What will challenge them? What will jazz them? What haven’t I seen from them? It’s just all part of the same equation. The audience includes the people making it. Actually, I think the people making it and me might make up about half of the audience.

You have quite a devoted following. As you write, do you consider what your fans will think? Is that a consideration?

It’s a consideration, but it’s not the first one. The first one is ‘What’s cool?’ If I think something is cool, then other people will too, because I’m a fan. Something that makes me go ‘Ohh, tingly,’ that’s something that other people will share. I am the audience. When you’re thinking about the fans, you’re more thinking about ‘What do we not have enough of?’ and ‘Where do we need to be next, emotionally?’ But beyond that, you’re thinking ‘What makes me excited, what’s wrong with me, and how cool is that?’ It’s a playground.

What an energizing way to think of writing! As a playground. Obviously the medium of television is different from novels (or films, etc), but all writing reaches some kind of audience. But how conscious are all writers about that audience? How does that perception of the audience change as it grows from something vague (for a new writer) to a vocal group of devoted fans (for someone like Whedon)? I know some writers have added material, gone in new directions, or spurned input from fans when it comes to very popular media with devoted fan followings (e.g. the inclusion of fan-favorite details in the new trilogy of the Star Wars films). I like Whedon’s reaction: he’s not going to shape plots exclusively based on fan reaction, but at the same time, he’s a fan, too…

I’ve been told a few times that as long as you’re writing something that gets you excited and you’re having fun writing it, that eagerness and enthusiasm for the material will come through to your audience. It’s something I notice starkly with my non-fiction (especially in school): when I’m enthusiastic about the subject matter, the manner of voice and tone I adopt to write about it changes drastically from when I am ambivalent or apathetic on the topic. With fiction, the line is finer, and can sometimes vary from scene to scene, chapter to chapter. If one chapter’s writing is sharper, snappier, more exact than another’s, that’s a clear marker for me for revision. Every scene needs to matter to be in the book, but for it to qualify, it really needs to matter on a visceral level.

The bit I quoted struck me mostly because I’m always concerned about my audience — I’m incapable of writing anything without imagining even an amorphous audience. Often I find myself imagining my[precocious know-it-all of a twelve-year-old]self as my audience, but just as often I think of any number of people I know, or have known, reading it and responding to it differently. I’ve heard [a few] writers say they don’t care about what others think about their writing. To some degree, I write for myself, but I don’t only write for myself. I write for the girl I used to be, wanting a book like this to read. I write for the teenager I was, desperate for an enthralling fantasy. I write for every writing teacher I’ve ever had (and yes, I can almost hear their commentary as I edit, recalling what each of them taught me in their own ways). I write for librarians, I write for parents. I write for my family, for their reactions when they finally get the hands on the books I’ve been puttering around in for years. I write for people I’ve never met and may never meet, but who may one day pick up my book and be struck by it. I’m not really even conscious of this…but at the same time, I’m entirely conscious of it.

So what are your thoughts on this? How conscious are you about audience as you write? Does it change depending on your genre or specific project?

1 comment September 26, 2009  /  categorized as: literary criticism & theory, media
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Are we asking less and talking more?

Thursday February 26, 2009

When I get together with other writer friends, some other people in the arts, even, we usually don’t converse with question-and-answer conversations. We usually volunteer information in a back and forth manner.

“I’m going to the museum later.”

“Oh, really? I love that museum. I used to go there all of the time with my family. I love the impressionists.”

“Me too. I’ve always been captivated by Monet.”

“Monet? Nah, Van Gogh, he’s the real master…”

One could go an entire — fulfilling, polite, engaging — conversation like that, without really asking questions of the other person. I’ve had whole round-tables like this with family and friends. But thinking of Jane Austen and how “polite conversation” is theoretically supposed to work, are we being rude by not asking the polite, requisite questions without which this style of conversation can still happily exist? Are we missing out on something? Are we being insufferably self-centered, all of us?

This volunteering of information rather than asking about it also ties in with the basic “Hi, how are you?” issue I’ve been thinking of lately. How many people say “How are you?” or “What’s up?” sincerely, waiting for an answer, versus saying it as a greeting in and of itself? (The ritual “Well” or “Good” barely counts as an answer, either.) Some people I know just say it as a standard greeting in and of itself.

Thinking of conversations I’ve had with friends either on the phone, in person, or over the internet, usually they start or get around to talking about something one of us said/posted online. For instance, someone changes their Facebook status to announce a break-up or an acceptance to grad school or a change of employment and I’ll ask them about it, and we’ll talk about that already-volunteered piece of information.

Which leads me to wonder: are we all a little bit more self-centered in this age of readily available status information?

Thinking about this the other day, I asked a friend about it. My question had been specifically about writers: are writers inherently self-centered? But as the conversation evolved I wondered, are we all a little bit differently focused in this age? In the world of Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, blogs, online photo albums, family websites, IM, email… are we all, or mostly, living under the assumption that when something important happens to a person we know, they’ll announce it using an internet social medium? When I was in middle school or high school, it was all about IM away messages, used mainly as statuses, as places for people to quote song lyrics that fit their mood, to inform the world of away message stalkers that stuff had happened in their lives. I feel like I was informed about more college acceptances or rejections of my friends that way than the traditional way.

In college, it was similar, but we also then had cell phones a lot more frequently. (When I entered college, only about 2/3 of my friends had cell phones; I didn’t have one to start college. When I graduated, every single person I knew had a cell phone.) Texting became popular over the years, as did the frequency, rapidity, and importance of email as the primary form of communication. I talked to my parents — and still do — more frequently via email than phone. I’m not usually comfortable picking up the phone to call someone, so this change in technology has been really interesting for me, personally.

Facebook came along when I was a freshman in college. It became, and remains, the number one way I have been keeping in contact with my college and high school friends. Without it I am fairly certain we all would have lost touch after those first classes or moments together. But because of it, because of people updating statuses, work information, contact information, we’re all in touch in a way we could not have been a generation ago — scant years ago. And we’re in touch while barely communicating. I haven’t heard the actual voice of many of my friends who live far away in months and years. We talk casually via the internet and social media and that’s it. We haven’t seen or spoken to each other “IRL” or “in RL” or “in real life” — but is that bad? (And what’s real or, conversely, fake, about these online communications?) Does this represent a degeneration of personal communication, or is this an efficient streamlining of it? We can stay in contact with multiple people at once; we can multitask socializing. Is that a good thing?

Are social media changing the way we all communicate? Are we becoming people who are less concerned with asking about statuses of people we know and instead relying on being informed? Is this a less or more effective form of communication? Is it strange? Are we asking less and talking more — and is that a good thing?

4 comments February 26, 2009  /  categorized as: media
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Thank you, Totallylookslike.com

Wednesday January 14, 2009

 star-wars-hush-98-comlink-totally-looks-like-gillete-sensor-for-women

Totallylookslike.com has proven that I am not the only person who saw Star Wars: Episode I in 1999 and thought, regarding this, “Oh my God, they were filming in Morocco and forgot to bring the prop for the jedi comlinks from London so one of the female prop masters took her razor, painted it, threw some glued metal pieces on it, and gave it to Liam Neeson and Ewan MacGregor, telling them very seriously to speak into it as if it’s not half a razor.” (That was the razor at the time, or at least one of them, and I certainly owned one.)

I feel absurdly validated.

5 comments January 14, 2009  /  categorized as: media
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Need… to… write…

Monday January 12, 2009

I realized I never talk about agents, editors, publishing, querying, or “trying to get published” often (if ever) on this blog. I don’t really talk about the industry, in other words. Thinking about why, I’ve realized that it comes down to two things: firstly, I’m not an authority on the industry, and I don’t want to seem to be. Reviewing books or talking about the world from my perspective are things I can do fairly comfortably but I don’t really like taking about things that actual agents, editors, and other publishing industry associated folks can discuss better than I can. I highly admire the agents and editors whose blogs I’ve stumbled across for what they do and the passion that keeps them going to work every day. What they write on their blogs is often interesting, varied, and valuable, and I know I could never discuss the blogosphere’s publishing industry topics the way they do. So I don’t.

The second reason I don’t really talk about the industry is that I’ve always been a very private person when it comes to a lot having to do with writing. My experience with the industry and what I’m doing regarding getting published falls into that category, too, I’ve found. I just… don’t really want to talk about it with the world at large. I’ll talk to friends or fellow aspiring authors about it but I won’t really go into a one-sided discussion here about it. I doubt I ever really will.

I’ve been thinking about the industry a lot lately, however, firstly because of the current economic climate, but secondly because I’ve finally gotten caught up on reading all of the recent entries of my way too many feeds of blogs written by agents, editors, and authors on my Google Reader. (I just subscribed to a whole bunch of new ones based on a few “best of 2008″ articles and discussions I’ve seen.) I even emailed a question-and-answer blog the one pressing pre-query question I’ve had for ages and she got back to me promptly with a terrific answer (which was… I’m over-thinking the issue. As I’d suspected! I over-think everything. Even this entry!).

Reading and thinking about all of the issues discussed on those blogs ultimately exhausts, inspires, and depresses me, all at once. I come away from reading them thinking of how eager I am to query… then how I’m not ready to yet… and the eagerness comes to a stumbling halt. Which then loops around to me getting energized about writing all over again… then once the eager energy spike subsides I go peruse Google Reader and… well, there you go. The cycle. No wonder I don’t really want to talk about the industry here. I mean, I should be writing fiction, right? Leave the industry speak to the pros.

Currently I’m in the “energized” writing stage of the cycle. I started a brand-spanking new draft last week (I know, I’m terrible!) and I’m hooked on it. It’s… so addictive. But the problem is I really ought to be pounding away at my main project instead, which has been dead in the water since before Christmas (oh, holidays, how you thoroughly threw off my groove). I need to recussitate it and get moving on that and then, I think, take a once-weekly “writing holiday” (as inspired by an article a friend linked me by writer Holly Lisle) and work on the new draft. We’ll see how my discipline holds out. I really need to get a project finished soon, though, or I might go mad. I want to get the ball rolling!

What’s weird about my writing this new draft, though, is that lately the newer the draft, the faster it’s written. It darn near drops out of my head fully formed, à la Athena. The world is unusual, too; it’s not the world of my series. The characters, plot (well, for the most part), backstory, voice have all just come fully realized. (Which is probably due in part to the fact that this draft is the one inspired by a dream I had last month that I woke up from thinking “Oh, that’d make a good novel,” and well, it is, so far.) But it’s weird. Even with the dream — a series of disconnected images and impressions of backstory and character — helping me, I still plunged into the draft taking more risks with plot and scene than I really ever have at any other point (other than NaNoWriMo’s novel). That is what makes it thrilling. Kamikaze noveling! Me, an empty page, and fingers flying across the keyboard. it’s thrilling and it reminds me why I love to write. Where I used to spend pages and pages worldbuilding (and infodumping) and setting the stage for what would happen by chapter three or four, with this draft (and the two most recent ones before it) it happens in chapter one. It’s like I’m writing a screenplay; the action starts early and drives the plot forward with thrilling momentum. Also that and I find I am getting more and more impatient to get to the meat of the story so starting with a bang helps me jump right into the good stuff. Which made me realize — if I don’t find the interesting beginning set up interesting any longer, what exactly about it had me interested way back when? Spending the first chapter setting up the world doesn’t make sense any longer when I know now how to show that world and how to make the world shine by having my character go out into it and look around. This should probably be my approach to writing new drafts of the old stuff. Just set what’s already done aside and start writing those stories I know so well from scratch.

Jeez, I’d intended this to be a short entry. I don’t think I’m capable of an entry that isn’t a thousand words or more… Well. Back to the grindstone!

3 comments January 12, 2009  /  categorized as: media, motivation & productivity, writing
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The importance of precise language.

Thursday January 8, 2009

No one talks about language, grammar, or other topics quite as well as Ryan North with Dinosaur Comics. This was a particular favorite that recently popped up again over the holidays when his strip was in rerun mode.

Enjoy.

2 comments January 8, 2009  /  categorized as: media
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