General Fandom Meta

hesychasm - in lieu of life - Fandom is focus. Fandom is obsession. Fandom is insatiable consumption. Fandom is sitting for hours in front of a TV screen a movie screen a computer screen with a comic book a novel on your lap. Fandom is eyestrain and carpal tunnel syndrome and not enough exercise and staying up way, way past your bedtime.

coffeeem - Let's slay a cliché. - "Honesty" means truth-telling. Like pregnancy, it's pretty much an all-or-nothing state. Supplementing it with brutality doesn't add more truth; it only adds pain.

danielleleigh - The one year anniversary.... - about year ago I feel headlong into manga territory when I picked up the second (not the first) volume of Hot Gimmick from the library. It says a lot about the addictive nature of that series that I didn't even need the first volume to fall head over heels with the format, the theme, the style.

Fandom-Specific Meta

darth_stitch - Harry, Snape and Judith McNaught... - I've figured out why is it that no matter how badly it is written, I find myself, on occasion, reading (and giggling) my way through a Snape/Harry bonding fic. BONDING, I said, not bondage - get your minds out of the gutters, kthnx

On Writing

ellen_fremedon - Thought of the day. - You know, there have got to easier ways to get Dan Radcliffe into a teenage love triagle in beautiful Calgary, Alberta. Many easier ways. But this summary, from mctabby's latest round of Summary Executions, clarified something for me that I've been noticing for a long time about badfic, or at least about the sort of exuberant badfic that twelve-year-olds (and other novice writers who are in touch with their inner twelve-year-old) produce: set-up completely, overwhelmingly out of proportion to the intended result.

ivyblossom - Four Spaces - In order to tell one story, I've determined that I need four spaces. These spaces are sometimes physical (or digital), but sometimes they're metaphorical. In order for something to grow, be cultivated, and, you know, "cook", you need to have a space to put it in. If you want it to grow in particular ways (say, if you're like me and it doesn't all spring fully-formed from your skull), you need to give the story different kinds of spaces to grow in. So far I have identified four separate spaces that have proved useful to me. Insofar as I know what I'm talking about which, again, is questionable.

cupidsbow - Essay: Performance Anxiety by cupidsbow - This morning, I had an epiphany about my writing (or more specifically, about publishing my writing on LiveJournal), and as is so often the case with epiphanies, it was equal parts horror, terror and a grudging sense of relief that at least now I knew what the problem was. // The problem was this: stage fright.

celisnebula - Sex and the Writer - I’m not sure what is so shocking about the words, in the right context they convey just the right amount of animalistic vibes that I want. When I write sex, I write graphic sex, if I write love scenes, I tone it down, but I’ll still use words like cock, penis, labia, and vagina. I don’t need to make it into something flowery, because that just goes into borderline ridiculous.

zortified - On writing and the trickiness thereof - Sometimes I read a story (often a shorter piece, but any length, really) and I find myself asking "why was that written?"

lunacy - [write what you -have to- know, and/or: world-building (is not) for dummies] - I think being so well-versed in fanfic and coming back suddenly to tons of (well-done) epic fantasy books, it's really been brought home to me just how bloody hard world-building really is, at least for me, because I loathe thinking on group scale rather than about inviduals.

Miscellany

metastudy - Harry Potter Fandom Practices - [Poll]