fanfiction epitome of incomprehensibility So... On Twitter, J. K. Rowling said congratulations to Ireland. Then she joked that Dumbledore and Gandalf could get married there (as suggested by a picture she posted). Well, our friends at Westboro Baptist Church said they would go to Ireland and protest this marriage. Evidently they do not like crossover fanfiction. 150527 ... e_o_i Hm. I see this was missing context. The context was that Ireland had just legalized gay marriage. Now it makes sense. Now everything in the world makes sense. 160908 ... epitome of incomprehensibility Weird sometimes to revisit earlier posts, because in the last couple of years many of Rowling's public statements have been disappointing. She doubled down on sowing suspicion about trans people, and in bad faith too. Defending some abstraction of womanhood isn't a good excuse. You're dealing with people, not abstract ideas. I'm a cis woman and I don't want you to metaphorically plonk my uterus into your Crate of Ideal Womanhood, thank you very much. It doesn't want to be there. It won't fit, anyway; your ideas are too small. David thinks Twitter is the problem. Well, social media more broadly. Thinks it makes people entrenched in their views, polarizes them. Was what she said initially that bad? he wondered. If other people hounded her and she responded in anger, then the whole thing could have easily snowballed from there. Maybe somewhat, I said. But I watched a video where someone pointed out the dog-whistle statements. I mean, that JKR was signaling to some sort of trans-exculsionary audience and not actually presenting good-faith concerns...not to get all my information from one source, or to exalt YouTube, but that analysis seemed convincing. ... Now that that's dealt with, I wonder if I should finish a fanfiction story begun a long time ago. It is possible! I finished one of them, but that's because it was short: a silly poem about a certain Douglas Adams series. "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Counterpoint": Trillian, Zaphod, and Marvin go to music school. It was inspired by a phrase my prof once uttered: "the contrapuntal dimension." Tell me that doesn't sound sci-fi-ish. The unfinished one was a multi-chapter continuation of A Clockwork Orange where, surprise, Alex goes to music school. Sort of wacky too, but with a serious point about your past coming back to haunt you: Alex embarks on a fresh start, he falls in love, and then everything falls to shit. No happy romance for you. Do you die? Graduate? Move to Canada? I don't know. I think I abandoned this around 2012 when the whole "haunted by your past" thing became too relevant. But he was worse, so why not enact some imaginary revenge? Let's give our once-evil narrator some good old-fashioned emotional agony. Also, my OC (original character) Melody Singh amused me by swearing a lot and defying his expectations...though she makes me wince a bit now, since the research I did in writing about 2nd-generation Indian immigrants to London was basically "read the book Londonstani" and "have a Canadian friend from a Sikh family." Big wow. Much qualifications. But a couple of weeks ago I sketched out this idea: how about Melody was one of a group of teenagers recruited by the gov't to help develop the Ludovico videos, since it's running over budget and they need cheap labour? That has potential, right? At least for cheap drama. Talk is cheap, but I like bargains. Actually, writing is usually time-consuming for me, whatever I'm doing, but like I said in blather_loves_you, practice is useful. 220804 ... e_o_i I don't always notice labels on book covers that say what awards the content received. Especially on library books. Perhaps my mind files such paraphernalia with the tags that libraries bestow. But yesterday I noticed that one of the books I was reading, March by Geraldine Brooks, has a little label saying it won the Pulitzer Prize. "Not bad for fanfiction," I joke to my mother. It follows the father character in Louisa May Alcott's Little Women as he struggles as a chaplain in the American Civil War, along with flashbacks to his earlier life. Mr. March, but what's his first name? Anyway, I've found the book absorbing, though I'm supposed to return it tomorrow and haven't finished it yet. 220807 what's it to you? who go blather from