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rallamajoopWell shit, I went and let another three months go past without posting a damn thing. Better make some excuses.
A lot of why I haven’t been around LJ much is that the next thing I was supposed to post was to be that Teen Wolf fic I started late last year, but over the intervening months, That TW Fic has grown from a birthday gift-ficlet into some sort of insane epic requiring me to plot out significant roles for the whole supporting cast and a climax drawing together at least three distinct threads of conflict - all in the name of engineering some sort of satisfactory conclusion for what remains, at its core, a concept born as an elaborate excuse to make Stiles and Derek have lots of sex in a fantasy setting. In the past few months I have gone through most of an A4 spiral-bound notebook and a couple of epic chat conversations with an old friend in attempt to hash through various plot snarls, bought four books on European mythology when neither google books nor the university library could get them for me, and written over 40,000 actual words of fic. I would be very surprised if that word count puts me more than halfway through. I am seriously in for the long haul on this one.
Possibly I’d be further along by now if I hadn’t gotten myself sidetracked with the research, but if nothing else, I shall emerge from this project with a bucketload of new mythology trivia, many hours practice at scouring google books, and a truly random new fannish affection for the writings of a particularly dedicated reverend-slash-mythology-buff from the 1920s.* For the record, very little of all I've read lately is going to show up in the fic in any shape or form. The objective has always been much less about historical plausibility (of which I make no claims whatsoever) than about hunting for ideas, and in the process, usually ending up on completely irrelevant tangents about learning what the late medieval witch-hunting craze tells us about early modern skeptical thought and the anxieties of Christian authorities, or on a mission to track down the first recorded appearance of a silver bullet in recorded werewolf narratives.** Normally it's a struggle to get myself interested in research at all, but ferreting out what people actually used to believe about Hollywood's favourite mythical monsters has turned out to be strangely addictive. As several RL friends of mine will surely now attest, I think this stuff is fascinating and should be shared, and some of the stuff will probably end up as the subject of a dedicated LJ post or two around here as soon as I find the time for it.
Over in the C&DP side of things, I also posted the first scene of the next part of Good Intentions over on my tumblr, largely to see if anyone would notice (a couple did, by the look of things?). Full version should be up just as soon as my beta reader's had the chance to go over it for me.
* Montague Summers (1880-1948), author of such works as The Werewolf in Lore and Legend and The Vampire in Europe, not to mention one of the first to attempt to translate the full text of the Malleus Maleficarum into something approaching English (result: a partial success at best). The man combines a fantastic aptitude for well-cited research with a terribly overblown turn for dramatic prose and quite shameless willingness to believe that it's all true. Modern credulous nutjobs of this calibre make me want to bash my head against a wall, but finding the same in a writer from a century ago is just adorable.
** It's in a book of German folklore published around 1840, as far as I have managed to uncover, though the notion of a silver bullet as a magic weapon able to take down the foe ‘no ordinary steal could touch’ dates back much further. Either way, it was clearly a well-established mainstay of werewolf fiction by the late 1800s. Wikipedia lies to you when it tells you it’s all an invention of 20th century fiction.
I've also been busy with that other thing I use this journal to post about.
In the space the last two months I've been to three different cons, and there's another coming up within the month. (From here on in, all we've got is Supanova, and that's it for the year. February-April has officially become Perth Geek Con season.) In order, the Season of Cons delivers us Genghiscon (small, cheap, low-stress general fandom con aimed at the student budget), Wai-con (the Perth anime convention) and Oz Comic Con (highly commercial general fandom con, first year in Perth, allegedly run by monkeys with a huge marketing budget, no formal relation to the massive media event from the US). Swancon (small, expensive, general fandom con, held in a hotel over Easter) is still to come later this month.
The lead-up to Wai-con is traditionally the high stress part of our year, since my sister always runs a table in the fanartist section and we usually have Massive Cosplay Plans to coordinate. This year, no massive cosplay plans managed to come together, leaving me to reuse my Nami costume and relax.
Naturally, this was my cue to decide to mod my clima tact so that the third section would spew smoke a week before the con. Many evenings, one keyring-sized smoke ring maker and a handful of spare electronic parts were sacrificed to the cause.
It turns out that it's actually pretty hard to get a good picture of moving smoke with a crappy camera under artificial light, so have some halfway-decent ones instead.
From the right angle, the smoke comes out with a blue glow from a little LED I added to highlight the effect, which is even harder to get a good picture of (the flash kills it altogether), but it looks a bit like this.
Later, with two weeks to go to Comic Con, it suddenly became very important that I make myself a New World Tashigi costume completely from scratch for the occasion. (Uh, long story) Even though I was prepared to cheat shamelessly on colour and detail and replace or add things later, this still meant making a knee-length coat with gold epaulettes, a fur colour and cuffs and the kanji for 'seigi' printed on the back, and still find time left over to make a loud shirt, style a wig, and order in some appropriate fake glasses.
Result?
I would like to take this moment to declare my newly-discovered devotion to the church of iron-on vinyl. Never tried applying the stuff myself before, but the roll I ordered in not only came out beautifully, it was ridiculously easy to cut to shape and apply.
I officially declare this a month well-spent.
Didn’t get much in the way of photos taken at the cons themselves, but there should be real photoshoots sometime soonish. Actually, I don’t have a lot to say about either con either, except to reinforce what I’ve said before: the more of these things we go to, the more the highlights is the excuse to hang out with people we don’t see otherwise, and probably squee over each others’ costumes and wander happily through the fields of shiny merchandise on sale in the traders’ hall.
Speaking of people I don’t see enough outside of cons, John’s send off at the close of the Sunday Cosplay comp was an occasion I would not have missed for the world. Missing you already, old friend – Australian cosplay will never be the same without you at the helm.
There's been assorted RL stuff too, of course, but nothing too dramatic. Might get around to posting about it later.
A lot of why I haven’t been around LJ much is that the next thing I was supposed to post was to be that Teen Wolf fic I started late last year, but over the intervening months, That TW Fic has grown from a birthday gift-ficlet into some sort of insane epic requiring me to plot out significant roles for the whole supporting cast and a climax drawing together at least three distinct threads of conflict - all in the name of engineering some sort of satisfactory conclusion for what remains, at its core, a concept born as an elaborate excuse to make Stiles and Derek have lots of sex in a fantasy setting. In the past few months I have gone through most of an A4 spiral-bound notebook and a couple of epic chat conversations with an old friend in attempt to hash through various plot snarls, bought four books on European mythology when neither google books nor the university library could get them for me, and written over 40,000 actual words of fic. I would be very surprised if that word count puts me more than halfway through. I am seriously in for the long haul on this one.
Possibly I’d be further along by now if I hadn’t gotten myself sidetracked with the research, but if nothing else, I shall emerge from this project with a bucketload of new mythology trivia, many hours practice at scouring google books, and a truly random new fannish affection for the writings of a particularly dedicated reverend-slash-mythology-buff from the 1920s.* For the record, very little of all I've read lately is going to show up in the fic in any shape or form. The objective has always been much less about historical plausibility (of which I make no claims whatsoever) than about hunting for ideas, and in the process, usually ending up on completely irrelevant tangents about learning what the late medieval witch-hunting craze tells us about early modern skeptical thought and the anxieties of Christian authorities, or on a mission to track down the first recorded appearance of a silver bullet in recorded werewolf narratives.** Normally it's a struggle to get myself interested in research at all, but ferreting out what people actually used to believe about Hollywood's favourite mythical monsters has turned out to be strangely addictive. As several RL friends of mine will surely now attest, I think this stuff is fascinating and should be shared, and some of the stuff will probably end up as the subject of a dedicated LJ post or two around here as soon as I find the time for it.
Over in the C&DP side of things, I also posted the first scene of the next part of Good Intentions over on my tumblr, largely to see if anyone would notice (a couple did, by the look of things?). Full version should be up just as soon as my beta reader's had the chance to go over it for me.
* Montague Summers (1880-1948), author of such works as The Werewolf in Lore and Legend and The Vampire in Europe, not to mention one of the first to attempt to translate the full text of the Malleus Maleficarum into something approaching English (result: a partial success at best). The man combines a fantastic aptitude for well-cited research with a terribly overblown turn for dramatic prose and quite shameless willingness to believe that it's all true. Modern credulous nutjobs of this calibre make me want to bash my head against a wall, but finding the same in a writer from a century ago is just adorable.
** It's in a book of German folklore published around 1840, as far as I have managed to uncover, though the notion of a silver bullet as a magic weapon able to take down the foe ‘no ordinary steal could touch’ dates back much further. Either way, it was clearly a well-established mainstay of werewolf fiction by the late 1800s. Wikipedia lies to you when it tells you it’s all an invention of 20th century fiction.
I've also been busy with that other thing I use this journal to post about.
In the space the last two months I've been to three different cons, and there's another coming up within the month. (From here on in, all we've got is Supanova, and that's it for the year. February-April has officially become Perth Geek Con season.) In order, the Season of Cons delivers us Genghiscon (small, cheap, low-stress general fandom con aimed at the student budget), Wai-con (the Perth anime convention) and Oz Comic Con (highly commercial general fandom con, first year in Perth, allegedly run by monkeys with a huge marketing budget, no formal relation to the massive media event from the US). Swancon (small, expensive, general fandom con, held in a hotel over Easter) is still to come later this month.
The lead-up to Wai-con is traditionally the high stress part of our year, since my sister always runs a table in the fanartist section and we usually have Massive Cosplay Plans to coordinate. This year, no massive cosplay plans managed to come together, leaving me to reuse my Nami costume and relax.
Naturally, this was my cue to decide to mod my clima tact so that the third section would spew smoke a week before the con. Many evenings, one keyring-sized smoke ring maker and a handful of spare electronic parts were sacrificed to the cause.
It turns out that it's actually pretty hard to get a good picture of moving smoke with a crappy camera under artificial light, so have some halfway-decent ones instead.
From the right angle, the smoke comes out with a blue glow from a little LED I added to highlight the effect, which is even harder to get a good picture of (the flash kills it altogether), but it looks a bit like this.
Later, with two weeks to go to Comic Con, it suddenly became very important that I make myself a New World Tashigi costume completely from scratch for the occasion. (Uh, long story) Even though I was prepared to cheat shamelessly on colour and detail and replace or add things later, this still meant making a knee-length coat with gold epaulettes, a fur colour and cuffs and the kanji for 'seigi' printed on the back, and still find time left over to make a loud shirt, style a wig, and order in some appropriate fake glasses.
Result?
I would like to take this moment to declare my newly-discovered devotion to the church of iron-on vinyl. Never tried applying the stuff myself before, but the roll I ordered in not only came out beautifully, it was ridiculously easy to cut to shape and apply.
I officially declare this a month well-spent.
Didn’t get much in the way of photos taken at the cons themselves, but there should be real photoshoots sometime soonish. Actually, I don’t have a lot to say about either con either, except to reinforce what I’ve said before: the more of these things we go to, the more the highlights is the excuse to hang out with people we don’t see otherwise, and probably squee over each others’ costumes and wander happily through the fields of shiny merchandise on sale in the traders’ hall.
Speaking of people I don’t see enough outside of cons, John’s send off at the close of the Sunday Cosplay comp was an occasion I would not have missed for the world. Missing you already, old friend – Australian cosplay will never be the same without you at the helm.
There's been assorted RL stuff too, of course, but nothing too dramatic. Might get around to posting about it later.