I'm Gonna Be A Little Bit Overdramatic One More Time And Then I Swear To God I'm Done - Part 2 · 5:20am Aug 8th, 2013
If you haven't read Part 1, you can find it here, or in the sidebar, or in your notifications, or under your mattress in that spot you thought nobody knew about but you. If you have read it, I'm not gonna waste any time getting to what's good here, so here we go.
Ever since Bronycon ended, pretty much everybody who was even vaguely near it has put up some kind of post-convention summary/review/brag session about what they did and how much fun they had meeting people and doing things of the horsewords variety. Among all those blogs, one commonality in particular has stood out to me: almost everybody has said something along the lines of "Wow, I had no idea <insert retrospectively cool dude/dudette here> would look like/act like/talk like/come up with horrendously offensive CAH plays like that!"
I mean, it's not like it's surprising that it's hard to judge people purely by their Internet persona. To that end, I definitely didn't expect Wanderer D to look and sound like the stunt double for The Most Interesting Man in the World, nor did I expect SleeplessBrony to look like someone I could easily picture lining up across from me in a rugby scrum. In the process of having my world get flipped and turned upside down, though, I took a moment to sit right back and think about what it was that made my previous mental images of these people so divergent from what they were actually like.
I don't really like what I figured out about myself on that front.
This is the second thing I said I'm an idiot for in my last post, so it's the first one I'm going to talk about now. I'll freely admit to being irrationally competitive in everything I do; for example, I have a genuine love/hate relationship with the Halo series just because of how easily I can have insane amounts of fun in one match and then be brought to screaming, volcanic rage by the next. The thing I realized this weekend, though, is that up to this point I've treated fan fiction--writing in general, honestly--the exact same way, like it was something in which other people needed to lose so that I could stand on top of them and win. I had a bunch of colleagues, sure, people whose writing and critiques and creative input I valued and respected, but... did I really have any friends? Anyone I could just shoot the breeze and dick around with, usually related to writing but sometimes about anything but?
My first instinct was to say that of course I did. I had guys like Couch, like Chromosome, like pretty much everybody in the EqD pre-reader circle. Beyond that, though? Beyond the one little segment of an immense fandom that I sequestered myself inside like I was afraid of what lay outside it.
I was afraid of it, but in the way I'm afraid of an opposing lock or the swimmer in the next lane over. Other writers scared me not because I thought we'd hurt each other physically, but because my own self-worth was inextricably linked to how well I could outrun them, outswim them, outwrite them. A week ago today, I genuinely looked at guys like Wanderer and Sleepless as numbers on a score sheet: I have 400 followers, they each have over 1500, and that means I need to catch up. That means I'm losing.
It's dehumanizing to think of people like that, and until I actually ended up in the same room with those guys and a hundred others like them, it didn't bother me. I knew I was doing it, but I didn't care because I really didn't think I was supposed to. That's how any sport works, any video game, anything done on the Internet. It's easy to make up anything you want about another person if he's just the nameless jerkoff on the opposite bench, or the faceless screenname with a bigger popularity score that he probably doesn't deserve anyway.
This is honestly how I saw all this a week ago. This is honestly how I saw things a month ago when I said I was quitting fan fiction to go write publishable work. Realizing that there's something immensely fucked up about that took most of that month, but in the end it all boiled down to one very simple concept. It's the first thing I said I'm an idiot for, it's the second thing I'm going to go into now, and it's totally going to be the most mind-blowingly shocking, unbelievable, minigolf-with-Andrew-Ryan-holy-shit-I-never-saw-that-coming thing you've ever heard. Are you ready for this? Are you really ready? Do you want to know what my deepest, darkest, most terrible secret that totally wasn't blatantly obvious and/or something I purportedly already figured out earlier this year is?
All right. Here it is:
I TAKE WRITING WAY TOO GODDAMN SERIOUSLY.
Go ahead and get those exasperated sighs out of your systems. We've got time.
Despite the déjà vu I'm probably giving most of you right now, this actually is a little bit different than the last time I said I figured that out about myself. Mainly because I was being entirely sarcastic up there, as opposed to last time when I was totally psyched and enraptured about how casual I was going to soon become. As of last weekend, the irony is no longer lost on me.
So with all that being said and expressed and soliloquized upon, where does that leave us/me? I guess I could list off a bunch of specific things I'm going to look at differently, but they all really sum up to another very simple concept: maybe, just maybe, I could stop being such a drama queen about everything. That holds a lot of things under its metaphorical canopy: just writing whatever I think would be fun without feeling the need to build up hype or post rambling eulogies for my fan fiction career, not writing to "win" whatever it is one "wins" by devoting one's life to carpal tunnel syndrome and whatever brand of alcohol gets me most efficiently through editing, writing instead because I just enjoy the game and the people I get to play it with, and most of all actually participating in the fandom I kept trying to clamber up to the peak of without ever actually touching any of it. (Not that there aren't still parts of it I'd rather not touch. Would it surprise you in the slightest if I told you there's already incest porn of Button Mash and his mom?)
This is the only part where I will actually tell you something I'm going to do differently, and it's really not all complicated. Starting tomorrow, I'm going to start what I hope is a consistent fic-reading schedule of one oneshot or one chapter of a longer fic per day. This isn't supposed to be some noble quest or selfless effort to force myself into becoming the true voice of the FIMFic masses or some bullshit. I just think it'd be fun and a good way to start involving myself more in this community, and also a good way to keep up some of the friendships I struck up at the con. Also, my Read Later list has 82 stories in it now after all the additions I made from the new people I'm following, so that's a contributing factor too.
The tl;dr version of this entire spiel is that I've been kind of a jerk in a few different ways, and meeting a bunch of you guys at Bronycon has helped me realize that and made me want to stop doing it. Of course, this would all be bittersweet if I didn't come with a promise of more horsewords from me, so I'll take the chance now to say that, as of like two minutes after I post this, Harmony is officially un-cancelled, as is It Only Hurts When I'm Sober. Technically, the latter will be on hiatus because I don't know precisely when I might get back to it, but it's only gonna have a few chapters and they won't be too tough to get through, so I'll see what I can work out on that front. Other than that, I want to see if I can't start posting more oneshots and the like, while definitely keeping any multi-chapters efforts unpublished until I have the whole thing finished and ready to roll. That's not even related to the fandom at large at all, that's just because serial publishing is mad stressful and I don't want to speculate or go into theatrics about them as much as I used to.
That's about all she wrote here, so after two way-too-long blog posts, that's finally all I have to say about that. Editing on the next chapter of Harmony is going a little slowly just because of its length and how many changes I've made in my writing style since I started writing it, but I'm really liking what I have so far, and I love basically every moment of the story I have planned after that. So again, not gonna speculate or anything, but if it makes any difference to you guys... I'm optimistic.
Peace out.
(Also, I might start doing mini-reviews of the stuff I read à la Present Perfect. I'll see how I feel about it once I've whittled down my Read Later list a bit, but if you have an opinion you want to toss into the ring now, please feel free.)
I fail to see the problem with this.
inb4 blog post next month saying they're re-cancelled.
I'm not sure how much I can put stock in the crop of 'life-changing experiences' everyone seems to have after meeting people in a convention center—maybe I'm only disbelief because I'm cynical and can't convince myself meeting people in real life could ever change anything.
That said, if you're making positive decisions as a result of something, that probably means that thing was good in the first place. Good on you for at least making an effort—though, we'll see if my speculations, given your previous track-record, turn out to be true.
Best of luck in your various new initiatives, Aqua-dude.
I think the mini-reviews idea would be cool, and I'm very glad Harmony is back in the works. Still waiting for it to complete before reading it, though.
I feel like I say this in every blog you post where there's a drastic shift in your goals, but best of luck in your endeavours.
Yay "it only hurts when I'm sober." I loved that thing.
Really, not serially posting as you write is the best possible thing. I can't count the number of times I've had to stealth edit or just plain rewrite a posted chapter because a better idea came along in a later one that needed foreshadowing.
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That's honestly the same effect it had on me, and that's kind of what I tried to get at here: it's a hugely different mindset to think of writing as being for other people as opposed to just myself, and it's one that's given me a huge drive to do more of it since I got back home. It's made the concept of finishing Harmony someday not only sound possible, but a whole lot of fun.
hah! fucking knew that coment was yours!
(its 6am, havent slept...)
aniway, happy to hear that feel renewed man!
and thanks for sharing the horsecon experience to those in the wrong continent
I've gone through the same dilemma of seeing other authors with higher numbers than my own and wondering what I'm doing wrong. I then remembered that fame (particular Internet fame) comes with a price. Expectations, weird fans and the like made me realize that I'm pretty comfortable with my lot in the fandom. I can write what I want without worrying too much about what the masses think.
Good to see you writing again! I've gone through some of your stories and have been pleasantly entertained.
Who the fuck is Button Mash?
As someone who worked that out a long time ago, I always think it's really weird/funny/a little sad when people post big dramatic "OMG I'm LEAVING can you BELIEVE it" blogs. (Yours wasn't too bad, mind, because you wrote it as well as everything else you write.)
But for serious -- write whatever you feel like writing, because the alternative is just going to feel like a chore, and the best way to kill the part of you that wants to write is to force it at gunpoint to churn out something it has no interest in.
Yesss I was going to suggest this. :D More opinions and signal boosts are always good.
re: Bronycon: You're definitely winning in the looks department with your manly facial hair and swimmer's physique and youthful charisma. :| Stop, you're making the rest of us look bad.
re: Taking writing seriously: Here's what I do. I take writing seriously. I take this community seriously because I care about it and the people involved in it (sometimes too much). I don't take fanfiction seriously. It's how I'm able to write so much terrible shit. And even when I'm writing crackfic because I haven't output anything serious in months, I still take time and effort to polish it, even if I don't take as much time as I would with something serious. Fanfic isn't a contest, and if it is, the only person I ever try to compete with is myself. (Along those lines, it's also important to keep in mind the different metrics by which you can judge your own writing, i.e., not so much "this story didn't do as well as my last one" but "it's Slice of Life and my Slice of Life stories tend to get X number of views, so it's successful".)
DEAR GOD IT'S TRUE I DID NOT MAKE THAT CONNECTION
hA
HAHA
HAHAHAHA
i.imgur.com/Zgke7e5.png
gifstumblr.com/images/i-request-the-highest-of-fives_672.gif
And as an aside to the rest of the stuff...
It's cool to see that BronyCon has made you think differently about Life,
The UniverseThe Internet andEverythingWriting.Looking forward to seeing more horsewords from you!
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Protagonist of an animation series by JanAnimations. OC, basically. His mom is cooler than him. That's about it.
You're such a silly horse.
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He's a fanimation character. Not an OC though. He's a canon backgrounder, and in Ask the CMC he's the colt Sweetie has an adorable (and appropriate for her age) crush on.
[youtube=S2VhC1QF7ww]
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I classify OCs as non-canon characters. Nothing against OCs. Love Ask the Crusaders, by the way.
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thanks
Can I give you an internet hug? Because you deserve it. Also, because I didn't manage to give you one at the con, because I couldn't remember which panel you were on :/
*hugs a swimmerbutt*
You're a very silly pony, Aqua. And I am exceedingly proud to know you. There's few I'd point to and go "They're one of the people I adore and you need to read their shit right now."
You're one of them. We love you, man. Don't ever forget that.
SCRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUM
SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM SCRUM
(I have no idea how to play rugby
)