Coming back to life
Jul. 28th, 2022 06:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
propergoffickI'm getting sick of posting stuff to AO3.
That's not a knock on AO3 in the slightest. It's just - archives are for completed material that's on the historical record, and I have a nasty habit of posting things that I don't finish, or decide need a heavy rewrite, or weren't cooked all the way through to begin with. I miss the workshop culture of Auld Live Journalle and forums, which is where I learned to write, and it's the process of writing and talking about writing that I enjoy at least as much as having the work out there. As life goes on I realise how rare it is to get the sustained commentary that kept me going with A Sense of Fatal Allegiance for as long as I did. I also realised, thanks to some good buddies on Discord, that I needed to dial up the levels of action-movie-hero-girl in The Fledgling for her prequel story, Just A Melody, which is the fic I've been failing to finish most during the TWO GODDAMN YEARS I spent forgetting Dreamwidth was a thing.
It's always refreshing to come back here though. Tumblr is the Reblogging Things platform, a Public Forum. There's something intimate and safe about a dead end and an old-fashioned, pre-algorithm, not-scrolling-endlessly kind of e-space. Anyone who knows about your Dreamwidth is someone who you can trust to not be weird about it, I feel.
I'm going to start posting fic here, I think. Drafts, really; stuff I'm still fussing with, working through, might scrap entirely if I don't like how they're going. Material I don't mind sharing, but don't want committed to the finality of archival.
I still have my bookshop job. Three years this October. This is the longest I've held down any gig that wasn't freelancing. What happens when you have job satisfaction and job security? I don't know how to process this at all. I did finally quit my PhD altogether, partly through lack of gumption but mostly because a cockup gave me a year of funding while I was on suspension. I spent it anyway, because fuel oil needed buying and I figured I had a year's wiggle room at the end, and then was told if I wanted to complete my second year I'd have to pay the fees out of my own pocket because I'd had my second year funding already. That was the last straw.
I did make The Hitch Hiker's Guide To Elfland in the end, and started work on a Wraith heartbreaker called Untitled Ghost Game before parting ways with the co-op. Indie RPG design is such a joyless space; everyone's very Online all the time, chasing clout and spotting fails, and nobody seems to like games or players very much at all really. A new release isn't greeted with joy but with virtue claims and a wariness about who involved will turn out to be - spin the wheel! - a sex pest, a wage thief, a racist fuckwit, or an otherwise dreadful person. The game itself is irrelevant: what is discussed is who should be paid, and what for, and whether so and so is right on about such and such, and where this all sits in The Discourse and who's said what about who on what platform and - fuck it all. Life is too short to spend marinating in other people's pain. The beef of marginalised people is legitimate but I can't stop myself from taking it on and making it my problem, even if I can't do anything material about it, and I am in so much pain of my own these days. I need to take happiness where I can find it, especially if nobody can show me on the doll where the material harm is done.
That's not a knock on AO3 in the slightest. It's just - archives are for completed material that's on the historical record, and I have a nasty habit of posting things that I don't finish, or decide need a heavy rewrite, or weren't cooked all the way through to begin with. I miss the workshop culture of Auld Live Journalle and forums, which is where I learned to write, and it's the process of writing and talking about writing that I enjoy at least as much as having the work out there. As life goes on I realise how rare it is to get the sustained commentary that kept me going with A Sense of Fatal Allegiance for as long as I did. I also realised, thanks to some good buddies on Discord, that I needed to dial up the levels of action-movie-hero-girl in The Fledgling for her prequel story, Just A Melody, which is the fic I've been failing to finish most during the TWO GODDAMN YEARS I spent forgetting Dreamwidth was a thing.
It's always refreshing to come back here though. Tumblr is the Reblogging Things platform, a Public Forum. There's something intimate and safe about a dead end and an old-fashioned, pre-algorithm, not-scrolling-endlessly kind of e-space. Anyone who knows about your Dreamwidth is someone who you can trust to not be weird about it, I feel.
I'm going to start posting fic here, I think. Drafts, really; stuff I'm still fussing with, working through, might scrap entirely if I don't like how they're going. Material I don't mind sharing, but don't want committed to the finality of archival.
I still have my bookshop job. Three years this October. This is the longest I've held down any gig that wasn't freelancing. What happens when you have job satisfaction and job security? I don't know how to process this at all. I did finally quit my PhD altogether, partly through lack of gumption but mostly because a cockup gave me a year of funding while I was on suspension. I spent it anyway, because fuel oil needed buying and I figured I had a year's wiggle room at the end, and then was told if I wanted to complete my second year I'd have to pay the fees out of my own pocket because I'd had my second year funding already. That was the last straw.
I did make The Hitch Hiker's Guide To Elfland in the end, and started work on a Wraith heartbreaker called Untitled Ghost Game before parting ways with the co-op. Indie RPG design is such a joyless space; everyone's very Online all the time, chasing clout and spotting fails, and nobody seems to like games or players very much at all really. A new release isn't greeted with joy but with virtue claims and a wariness about who involved will turn out to be - spin the wheel! - a sex pest, a wage thief, a racist fuckwit, or an otherwise dreadful person. The game itself is irrelevant: what is discussed is who should be paid, and what for, and whether so and so is right on about such and such, and where this all sits in The Discourse and who's said what about who on what platform and - fuck it all. Life is too short to spend marinating in other people's pain. The beef of marginalised people is legitimate but I can't stop myself from taking it on and making it my problem, even if I can't do anything material about it, and I am in so much pain of my own these days. I need to take happiness where I can find it, especially if nobody can show me on the doll where the material harm is done.
