Remix

I have writers' block.

I'm pretty sure lots of people out there think this is a wanky concept, notably Terry Pratchett, but I can't help that. I'm not a professional writer, I'm an overworked undergraduate; so when I don't have the inclination to write it quietly drops off my mental priorities list, and without noticing I find weeks have gone by since I last opened up a blank text document. I don't know what's causing it this time. Last term I wondered if Oxford in general had this effect, but I did write a bit during Michaelmas - two or three baby!Doctor Prydonian fics, and more importantly, Another Horsedreamer's Blues. I'm still quite proud of that fic; it may well remain my sole effort in Firefly fandom, which sadly makes it ineligible for remixredux, but I'm still pleased with how real the characters became. I think that's the mark of good source material, actually; if the canon characters are consistent and well-realised, the fic about them should be better.

So, writers' block. I had a brief idea for another Firefly fic, and while the basic idesa is sound the fic keeps self-destructing after the first two paragraphs, which I then delete in disgust. I also have an absolutely stellar beginning for a fic - two pages of girl!Doctor mayhem that I'm absurdly pleased with - that then just stops. Boom. I have no idea what to do with it.

So perhaps now is not the time to sign up for a ficathon, but remixredux is my Fandom Event of the year. I know that for some people it's yuletide, but I can never write fic through the busiest time of year (that is, October and November, which are far busier for me than Christmas is), and so I've never signed up for that. Remix is different, because it's original, it's a different type of creativity, and reading a remix of your fic by a really, really good author is perhaps one of the greatest joys in life. I'd never heard of casirafics before she remixed Making Moony Laugh, but even then I knew Mapmakers was probably going to be an eternal classic. Which it is, because it's just that good, but more so for me, because I think that if I'd been a little older (when writing MML, I was only fifteen and I hadn't been in fandom for more than a year or so) and with more vision, that fic might have been something far better. And the remix sort of showed me what to aim at, so to speak. The year after, angelgazing remixed A Sequence of Ghosts. I was just re-reading Oleander Silence and remembering why I liked it so much; it's a beautiful piece, and again, far better than the story it's based on.

Mmm. I didn't really plan to write a remix retrospective, but now I've got this far I might as well mention the remixes I've written myself. I didn't post either of them here, or anywhere else on the web, because I wasn't fond of either of them. The first one, particularly - it wasn't entirely my fault, as my assigned author wrote mainly Harry/Draco porn, something I would take Voltaire's advice in spending my life opposing - because it was pretty bad, but the second one could have been better. The problem there, I think, is that amchau was my assigned author. This was good in one way - I spent two months gleefully lying to her about everything to do with the remix, and had a glorious reveal when the anonymity was lifted - but not in another, because it's a quite different thing, remixing a stranger's fics, to remixing fics you know almost as well as you know your own. Am-Chau claims she didn't guess who had written her remix story before she found out, but that it seemed obvious in retrospect. Which is, I guess, the effect I was going for.

Anyway, enough blather. I have been to a lecture today - shock horror! - and now the plan is to have a look at that dreadful French essay, take soup to Claire, who is stricken with some sort of terrible lurgy, go to tute, return from tute and sleep for the rest of the day.

Edited to add: Regarding dreadful French essay - anyone know if you can use "schism" as a verb?