interview meme by skuf
Nov. 1st, 2006 02:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kraitI requested five interview questions from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
skuf, so here are my answers:
1) You never update anymore - why?
Oh, my. I could write you a novel of apologia on this one! What it mainly comes down to, however, is fandom and life. Fandom, at least the bits of it I tend to frequent, seems to have really slowed down after the release of HBP -- understandably, perhaps, because HP/SS is going to be trickier after that one in a lot of ways; and also I suspect that a lot of writers have lost interest, or at least found new, more pressing interests to compete, be they another pairing or another fandom (I sure am seeing a lot of SGA on my Flist lately, and by "lately" I mean in the past six months plus). Again, I find this entirely understandable; I feel my own enthusiasm has waned a little, too, or at the least is now having to fight harder to keep a portion of my attention, because the first flush of YAY!Newcanon! is over, and with slimmer fic output this time round, it didn't take as long for that new feeling to fade and the difficulties of it all to shine through. My own writing has stalled out, mostly due to age -- the stories I had pieces of are now pretty much hopelessly outdated/AU, and the changes in canon to various characters means that my characterisation and reasoning are off now, too.
Maybe a lot of HP/SS fandom has found that the shine has worn off, with only one book to go before everything is permanent and solid -- so much of it is based on "we don't know what the future will hold, we can write anything," and with every book the range of "everything" got narrower; now there's really only face-the-challenge or AU-ignore-everything, so maybe people are feeling their creativity is getting cramped. (Which, if they're anything like me, means their creativity has even more incentive to latch on to other shiny distractions, where the plotting is easier and you don't have to choose between oodles of explanation versus going AU just to start your story off.)
The other part is all pretty much a case of real life affecting fandom; a year ago I moved and began school again, which (between job searches and classes and work and tests and changing jobs and the occasional vague attempt at a social life) ate up my time. I also went through a weird phase a couple months ago where I just didn't have any interest in the internet, period, for any reason; I think it was just another form of the highly-antiosocial phases I go through. But anyway, that brings us to right now. For the last month(ish) I've been seriously, or at least half-seriously, questioning where I am and where I'm going; what I'm going to school for doesn't, suddenly, seem quite so shiny and interesting, and my job is starting to convince me that, at the least, this area isn't what I want to do, and at most maybe the whole thing isn't so much what I want either.
On the other hand, the ideas that have occurred to me as alternatives are just about as vague, and I have no idea how to go about doing any real research, and I suspect are based as much on wild optimism that I'm even capable of it as much as they are on any actual ability. The more logical part of me is pointing out that this would be essentially throwing over one uncertainty for another equally shaky uncertainty; and have I considered that this might all be the effect of Seasonal Affective Disorder; and have I thought about what will happen if do decide to switch, i.e. I will have to talk to my parents about it.
2) What's your take on sex vs. gender?
You're born with one (or more, I suppose), society hands you the other. For the sake of your mental health, I strongly suggest avoiding as much as possible of the latter, especially if you are female.
I do distinguish between them in writing/discussion, but in speaking I use them interchangeably, because I like variety in my sentences and generally the person I'm talking to can tell from context. :D Hey, you're asking someone who once began reading a thesaurus because it was there; I like synonyms, and I like verbal variety. Having two words is always better than having one! But I stick with the politically correct differentiations when in writing.
Much more personally, this is one of those areas where I'm really strange. It's not that I want to be male; but I don't like being female either, at all. No upper body strength, hip structure more prone to problems, and then there's the gooey internal things like menstruation and breasts and fat storage. But if I were male there would be potbellies and hair everywhere and huge feet, a marginally better deal but still definitely unpleasant.
I'd like to design a neuter gender. It'd have a vaguely male body build, female body hair patterns, and probably a clitoris because I am rather attached to that bit :D and otherwise nada as regards reproductive features. No gonadal structures at all. Oh, and it would have a metabolism like a steam engine's furnace, because I'm always bloody freezing yet I have all this fat; clearly my metabolism needs a major overhaul. :D
3) What's your favorite movie?
The Last Unicorn, made in 1982 and staple of my childhood. I'm positive my mother must somehow never have watched it (somehow, because I know I watched it about once a week!), but oh! Beautiful animation, realistic-looking (well, sorta) characters, and a story that was in no way dumbed down for children, from the swearing to the bittersweet ending. There is soooo much to that movie (Peter Beagle worked on the script; it's very close to the book), so much that I still think about and theorize on and ponder to this day. It has so much to say about the nature of life ("there are no happy endings, because nothing ends"), and growing up, and magic, and self-determination. Eeee.
I read a lot of "children's literature" as a child, and I like to think that did something for me; I was the kid who disdained R.L. Stine in favour of all those Newbury Award winners with complex stories and emotions and motivations. Hopefully it left me with a lingering distaste for simplified stories and one-dimensional writing that will carry over into anything I do manage to write. :D
4) How do you usually wear your hair, and how often do you go to the hairdresser's?
Hahahaha! :D Parted down the middle, hanging straight down. You can't make it do anything else, not with a whole bottle of hairspray and a selection of styling tools to put the Spanish Inquisition to shame. It's been this way since... I don't know, but I know my age was in the single digits. :D I have very very straight hair (loses curl after an hour or so, even with spray or mousse), and I love it that way. What I don't love is the length -- I've always wanted really long hair, but mine just stops at around the end of my shoulderblades -- and the colour, which used to be sun-streaked (when I lived in the desert) but around puberty/moving away turned a sort of dark colourless brown. Like my mother's, my hair has no shine at all, so I usually dye it just to give it some sheen. Usually blonde-ish, sometimes closer to its actual colour.
At night or at work or when alone or mad at it, it gets yanked back into a ponytail; sometimes doubled or tripled up. I have more scrunchies than the law allows. That's it, though; aside from one of those 1990s ponytail flippers, I don't do styling. I don't own a blow dryer, and didn't own a curler till last year (it's still in the package). :D As for hairdressers... generally when the ends have split so badly they look frizzy, I make a trip home and get my mother to trim them off. Though I've had it dyed professionally several times in the past, and for (at least some) job interviews I've made the effort to do something with it. (Generally, this is "pull the top half up and back, curl under the ends.) I'm cheap, I just can't bring myself to pay someone that much money for cutting off an inch or two of hair from the bottom. When I'm no longer in driving distance from home, I suspect I'll just do it myself. I rarely care what people think of my appearance, so I don't particularly care if it ends up looking like it was cut with scissors by someone using two bathroom mirrors to triangulate. :D
5) Do you still enjoy the fics you loved when you first entered fandom, or do you find that some of them don't age well?
Hmmm. I think it's mostly the former. My brain must store a backup file of the time period somewhere, to call up for any re-readings, because I still love pretty much all of those first fics -- they still have that new-discovery, it's-a-brave-new-world feel to them I suspect the author had, when HP canon basically consisted of a list of characters and the playing field was wide open. :D A few tend to cause cognitive dissonance; Sushi's Civil War series, for instance, broke my brain when canon told me Snape was shorter than Sirius, and for I think about a year tall!Snape actually overrode canon!Snape in my head. :D Trivial stuff like that; I guess there's that inner awareness that it came before the current canon, and thus is not to be judged according to it, so I don't really find myself going "whoa, what was this writer on?!" so much as maybe occasionally thinking wistfully, "wow, I remember when we still thought Harry had the chance of someday having a real family, with Sirius and Albus, back when we thought the future could be that bright." Or, y'know, Snape had a chance of receiving the recognition and honour he craved, and finding some contentment within himself. A kind of nostalgia, I guess, around the awareness that the fic is something from another time. Really pleasant, overall, though with that wistful edge of "what's gone is gone."
skuf, so here are my answers:1) You never update anymore - why?
Oh, my. I could write you a novel of apologia on this one! What it mainly comes down to, however, is fandom and life. Fandom, at least the bits of it I tend to frequent, seems to have really slowed down after the release of HBP -- understandably, perhaps, because HP/SS is going to be trickier after that one in a lot of ways; and also I suspect that a lot of writers have lost interest, or at least found new, more pressing interests to compete, be they another pairing or another fandom (I sure am seeing a lot of SGA on my Flist lately, and by "lately" I mean in the past six months plus). Again, I find this entirely understandable; I feel my own enthusiasm has waned a little, too, or at the least is now having to fight harder to keep a portion of my attention, because the first flush of YAY!Newcanon! is over, and with slimmer fic output this time round, it didn't take as long for that new feeling to fade and the difficulties of it all to shine through. My own writing has stalled out, mostly due to age -- the stories I had pieces of are now pretty much hopelessly outdated/AU, and the changes in canon to various characters means that my characterisation and reasoning are off now, too.
Maybe a lot of HP/SS fandom has found that the shine has worn off, with only one book to go before everything is permanent and solid -- so much of it is based on "we don't know what the future will hold, we can write anything," and with every book the range of "everything" got narrower; now there's really only face-the-challenge or AU-ignore-everything, so maybe people are feeling their creativity is getting cramped. (Which, if they're anything like me, means their creativity has even more incentive to latch on to other shiny distractions, where the plotting is easier and you don't have to choose between oodles of explanation versus going AU just to start your story off.)
The other part is all pretty much a case of real life affecting fandom; a year ago I moved and began school again, which (between job searches and classes and work and tests and changing jobs and the occasional vague attempt at a social life) ate up my time. I also went through a weird phase a couple months ago where I just didn't have any interest in the internet, period, for any reason; I think it was just another form of the highly-antiosocial phases I go through. But anyway, that brings us to right now. For the last month(ish) I've been seriously, or at least half-seriously, questioning where I am and where I'm going; what I'm going to school for doesn't, suddenly, seem quite so shiny and interesting, and my job is starting to convince me that, at the least, this area isn't what I want to do, and at most maybe the whole thing isn't so much what I want either.
On the other hand, the ideas that have occurred to me as alternatives are just about as vague, and I have no idea how to go about doing any real research, and I suspect are based as much on wild optimism that I'm even capable of it as much as they are on any actual ability. The more logical part of me is pointing out that this would be essentially throwing over one uncertainty for another equally shaky uncertainty; and have I considered that this might all be the effect of Seasonal Affective Disorder; and have I thought about what will happen if do decide to switch, i.e. I will have to talk to my parents about it.
2) What's your take on sex vs. gender?
You're born with one (or more, I suppose), society hands you the other. For the sake of your mental health, I strongly suggest avoiding as much as possible of the latter, especially if you are female.
I do distinguish between them in writing/discussion, but in speaking I use them interchangeably, because I like variety in my sentences and generally the person I'm talking to can tell from context. :D Hey, you're asking someone who once began reading a thesaurus because it was there; I like synonyms, and I like verbal variety. Having two words is always better than having one! But I stick with the politically correct differentiations when in writing.
Much more personally, this is one of those areas where I'm really strange. It's not that I want to be male; but I don't like being female either, at all. No upper body strength, hip structure more prone to problems, and then there's the gooey internal things like menstruation and breasts and fat storage. But if I were male there would be potbellies and hair everywhere and huge feet, a marginally better deal but still definitely unpleasant.
I'd like to design a neuter gender. It'd have a vaguely male body build, female body hair patterns, and probably a clitoris because I am rather attached to that bit :D and otherwise nada as regards reproductive features. No gonadal structures at all. Oh, and it would have a metabolism like a steam engine's furnace, because I'm always bloody freezing yet I have all this fat; clearly my metabolism needs a major overhaul. :D
3) What's your favorite movie?
The Last Unicorn, made in 1982 and staple of my childhood. I'm positive my mother must somehow never have watched it (somehow, because I know I watched it about once a week!), but oh! Beautiful animation, realistic-looking (well, sorta) characters, and a story that was in no way dumbed down for children, from the swearing to the bittersweet ending. There is soooo much to that movie (Peter Beagle worked on the script; it's very close to the book), so much that I still think about and theorize on and ponder to this day. It has so much to say about the nature of life ("there are no happy endings, because nothing ends"), and growing up, and magic, and self-determination. Eeee.
I read a lot of "children's literature" as a child, and I like to think that did something for me; I was the kid who disdained R.L. Stine in favour of all those Newbury Award winners with complex stories and emotions and motivations. Hopefully it left me with a lingering distaste for simplified stories and one-dimensional writing that will carry over into anything I do manage to write. :D
4) How do you usually wear your hair, and how often do you go to the hairdresser's?
Hahahaha! :D Parted down the middle, hanging straight down. You can't make it do anything else, not with a whole bottle of hairspray and a selection of styling tools to put the Spanish Inquisition to shame. It's been this way since... I don't know, but I know my age was in the single digits. :D I have very very straight hair (loses curl after an hour or so, even with spray or mousse), and I love it that way. What I don't love is the length -- I've always wanted really long hair, but mine just stops at around the end of my shoulderblades -- and the colour, which used to be sun-streaked (when I lived in the desert) but around puberty/moving away turned a sort of dark colourless brown. Like my mother's, my hair has no shine at all, so I usually dye it just to give it some sheen. Usually blonde-ish, sometimes closer to its actual colour.
At night or at work or when alone or mad at it, it gets yanked back into a ponytail; sometimes doubled or tripled up. I have more scrunchies than the law allows. That's it, though; aside from one of those 1990s ponytail flippers, I don't do styling. I don't own a blow dryer, and didn't own a curler till last year (it's still in the package). :D As for hairdressers... generally when the ends have split so badly they look frizzy, I make a trip home and get my mother to trim them off. Though I've had it dyed professionally several times in the past, and for (at least some) job interviews I've made the effort to do something with it. (Generally, this is "pull the top half up and back, curl under the ends.) I'm cheap, I just can't bring myself to pay someone that much money for cutting off an inch or two of hair from the bottom. When I'm no longer in driving distance from home, I suspect I'll just do it myself. I rarely care what people think of my appearance, so I don't particularly care if it ends up looking like it was cut with scissors by someone using two bathroom mirrors to triangulate. :D
5) Do you still enjoy the fics you loved when you first entered fandom, or do you find that some of them don't age well?
Hmmm. I think it's mostly the former. My brain must store a backup file of the time period somewhere, to call up for any re-readings, because I still love pretty much all of those first fics -- they still have that new-discovery, it's-a-brave-new-world feel to them I suspect the author had, when HP canon basically consisted of a list of characters and the playing field was wide open. :D A few tend to cause cognitive dissonance; Sushi's Civil War series, for instance, broke my brain when canon told me Snape was shorter than Sirius, and for I think about a year tall!Snape actually overrode canon!Snape in my head. :D Trivial stuff like that; I guess there's that inner awareness that it came before the current canon, and thus is not to be judged according to it, so I don't really find myself going "whoa, what was this writer on?!" so much as maybe occasionally thinking wistfully, "wow, I remember when we still thought Harry had the chance of someday having a real family, with Sirius and Albus, back when we thought the future could be that bright." Or, y'know, Snape had a chance of receiving the recognition and honour he craved, and finding some contentment within himself. A kind of nostalgia, I guess, around the awareness that the fic is something from another time. Really pleasant, overall, though with that wistful edge of "what's gone is gone."