Weekly Wrap Up - 7 August
We did it, kids! We wrote shark skin rough first drafts of the chapters on the history of fic media, author function, and reader function in fic production. I met with my advisor on Thursday and we worked through how to structure my analysis. We ended up having a long conversation about the aesthetic differences between ‘author’ and ‘reader,’ and who assigns meaning to a work. It was a bit of a head spinner, but he said that I’m asking really good questions, so I’ll take the win.
I wrote 8529 words this week (just over half the 15,000 required!). It’s a relief to have something to work with, even though it needs a lot of editing (like...bucket loads. My advisor was like ‘I did control F and I couldn’t find a mention of Darnton?’ and I was like ‘oh right whoops that is indeed the scholar I am basing everything off of...I should probably mention him’). I had to remind myself of this tweet a lot while writing this week:
It’s nervewracking to confront my own mediocrity with my first drafts! I know it’s gonna be rough and I have to forgive myself for that.
Also! Also! I made graphics of those draft models I shared a few weeks ago (this was on Monday when I was having writer’s block.) Let me know what you think! Are they legible? (Particularly the community one - this is sort of how I’m imagining that Brownian motion concept I wrote about a few weeks back.)
The design on the Fanfiction Communication Circuit is a lil clunky but Canva didn’t let me rotate my page to be horizontal so I designed everything in portrait orientation and then rotated it, hence the slight skew.
I made these with good old Canva, watermarked with Watermarkly. These will end up being in the introduction of the dissertation, and I’ll return to them as framing devices in each chapter.
Because I reopened my Canva account, I also procrastinated for 45 minutes this Friday morning by doing a digital visualization of an Avatar: The Last Airbender/Star Wars flow-chart that @estrangedlestrange and I sketched out a few months back. I’ll post that in the next post (even though it’s not book history and fanfiction! I apologize for the recent divergences. I’m also considering reviving a fandom account so I can actually reblog the beautiful art I scroll by every day.)
