#ghostyouknow27

[throwthewindowwide]

http://seasonal-spuffy.livejournal.com/426719.html I have been looking for this fic for months! Where Pies Go When They Die by Ghostyouknow27. Summary: Hell, as it turns out, serves a great cherry pie. Fantastic Spuffy with slight Supernatural crossover. Twin Peaks references but you don't have to get them to love this fic. Author bills it as a crack fic but, really, it's one of the most well written things I've ever read. It left an impression on me, for sure. Read this.

[snickfic]

6 & 8!

6. thoughts on critique

I actually answered a very similar question for another meme a few months ago, and I am copy/pasting, because my answer is looong.

So, hmm, the first big thing I want to know when I’m critiquing someone’s work is what kind of feedback they want. I learned this the hard way when I hadn’t been in fandom too long and gave someone a much more thorough critique than they were after. I think they wanted a quick typo/phrasing beta, but I was coming from a community that typically took an entire work apart as part of the crit, and I’m pretty sure I freaked the person out and made them sad, and we didn’t really talk again after that. So: find out what the person wants! This is something I still have to remember, and I don't always. So I’ve done basic typo checks for a lot of people, I’ve questioned plot points that seemed either unlikely or just unclear, if it’s a fandom I know I will maybe talk characterization, although typically that’s mostly a voice check. If I know the person pretty well, I will also point out things that I feel could be read the wrong way or might be unfortunate to the structure of the story; for a really blatant example, if all the female characters in the story are dead by the end.(I’ve never actually had to point that out to anyone I was betaing for, but it’s that kind of thing - “Hmm, have you really thought through all the implications of this story choice you’ve made?”)So those are all things that typically happen before a story gets posted. And I often get someone to do the same for me. Uh, usually that someone is you, Ghost! So for everyone else: ghostyouknow27 gets to read most of my stuff in snippets, so she’ll comment on story choices/lack of clarity/plot holes, and those are really helpful but also, I think, the most sensitive kinds of critique one is likely to get from a beta. It’s one thing to be told your metaphor ran away from you in this one place, and another that your character’s actions in the final third don’t feel properly motivated. So it’s very good I have someone willing to comment on those kinds of things for me, but it has to be someone I know and trust and whose judgment I already trust. However, all of that is just, like, functional critique. What I REALLY love to receive (and also enjoy writing, although it takes time to do it thoroughly) is reader response stuff. That is, a reader goes through a story of mine, picks out the phrases they liked the best, describes their feelings at various turns of events, tells me how much sympathy they feel (or don’t) for various characters, etc. And better yet, the deepest level of engagement (and also the most work) is when a reader engages with the story as a piece of literature, looking for themes, theorizing about how various elements contribute to the whole, often pointing out thematic and characterization connections I hadn’t consciously noticed myself, etc. Obviously that kind of engagement only comes along once in a blue moon. I was involved in a Buffy-fandom crit group once with I think 12-15 members where each week one of us posted an already-completed work to the locked comm and everyone else read and discussed it for the week, and it was the BEST. People really dug into word and story choices and how they impacted the whole. It was a lot of fun as a reader, especially getting to discuss my feelings in-depth about a fic with other people (which is generally discouraged in fandom, at least in public), and as a writer it was one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had. And nowadays there are anon memes, which can serve some of the same function, at least with stories popular enough to get talked about. There’ve been several SPN WIPs that have been an ongoing conversation at the SPN anon meme, although now the activity at that comm has died down so much that I think those days are probably past. THERE YOU HAVE IT. All my critique thoughts. :)

And number 8 I answered elsewhere.

[architeuthism]

Excerpt commentary for "There's a Hell of a Good Universe Next Door"

For the fic commentary meme, ghostyouknow27 requested an excerpt from There's a Hell of a Good Universe Next Door, a story about dorks in space.

“That’s just great,” Collins said, and Jared tried to focus on him as he approached the side of the bed. “What’s this goo you’re making?”

“Softens my skin,” Jared said raggedly. “Skin becomes the cocoon.”

I had a really hard time getting rolling on this story, so I wrote a lot of it in a hurry at the last minute, and still turned it in late, like an asshole. A lot of it was just waffling about the ridiculousness of the concept and whether I could execute it, I think. Anyway, because of the time constraint I basically created for myself out of nothing, some corners got cut, sometimes for the better.

My original idea for the cocoon thing had Jared constructing one for himself like a caterpillar. I decided that was too self-directed, and for a while was going to go with a second-instar person's parents and relatives building a cocoon around them after they entered the goo stage, which opened up possibilities like embedding charms in the cocoons a la the charms in Egyptian grave wrappings, families making cocoons ahead of time to send away with their kids, Jared sadly climbing into a cocoon he bought at a drugstore before he set out, etc. What I did is more compact than that would have been, and maybe served the body horror and h/c angles of this story better, but I am sorry I didn't get to explore some of that stuff.

“Wow. Okay. I’m sure this is a natural, beautiful thing for you—”

Jared almost smiled. “No, it’s gross.”

Affably reads most of my writing as I write it and more or less liveblogs it back at me, which is helpful in a whole lot of ways, and I think this line got a bigger laugh out of her than anything else in this story. It's one of my favorite lines too, and one of the better examples of the thing that happens throughout the story where Misha and Jared are either suddenly and unexpectedly simpatico, or suddenly and unexpectedly foreign to each other.

You didn't excerpt the bit later when Misha says the goo smells kind of good and Jared tells him it's nutritious (my single favorite exchange in the story), but the reason for that is that it's meant to calorically pay back the people watching over a sub-adult in the cocoon if food supplies get tight, partly inspired by the way discus fish "nurse" their offspring with their own skin mucus. I should have had Jared eating a lot more and putting on some extra weight during the trip toward Earth.

“I’m so glad you said that,” Collins said. He paused, and Jared didn’t have the energy to fill the silence. “What do I do?”

“Huh?” said Jared, drifting.

I wrote this either when I had a cold, or just after I'd recovered from one, so it's appropriate that I'm commentating it now, when I've got another cold. A lot of the body horror Jared experiences is just cold symptoms turned up to eleven, with glycerine poured on them.

“I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to just leave you here to ruin a set of my sheets. What do I do?”

Thinking was so much work. “I won’t stick to a smooth surface,” Jared said eventually. “You could move me to the bathroom.”

“Oh, that’s going to be awesome.” Collins lifted Jared’s wrist gingerly off the bed and tugged experimentally at the sheet, which came away from Jared’s skin much more easily for him than it had for Jared. A couple of days ago Collins touching him like this would’ve been thrilling and confusing but basically good; right now, oversensitized and sick, Jared would have yanked his hand away if he could have, and the vile sensation of the sheet pulling away made him want to scream. “Oh wow, you’re naked. This is not how I imagined this happening. Okay, put you in a shower stall, then what?”

This, for example. A few years ago I had a flu bad enough that I went to the doctor with it (they told me to drink lots of clear fluids and gave me prescription-strength tablets of an over-the-counter painkiller). I told them that my skin hurt and they looked at me like I was a weirdo, but this is something I get every time I have a cold: my skin becomes unpleasantly sensitized and touching any surface is both painful and loathsome. It's like nails on a chalkboard. For skin. I don't think I conveyed the true nastiness of it, frankly.

Anyway, here we also have an example of how openly Misha has been hitting on Jared without Jared noticing. Jared, you dweeb. He's been escalating for a week and a half or whatever, seeing how blatant he has to get before Jared notices.

“Um. Throw — throw me out the airlock.”

Collins dropped Jared’s wrist. Jared found the wherewithal to yelp. “What?”

“Not yet,” Jared said, still wincing. “In a few days. It breaks the cocoon.”

“You are fucking joking.”

“It’s the only way.”

Misha reluctantly airlocking Jared is one of the first things I knew was going to happen in this story, and a lot of Jared's biology, and therefore his culture, were constructed to justify it. So of course, when it happens, Jared is insensate and all the audience sees is the results.

“Also seems like a fine way to kill you if I time it wrong. Which I will, because I don’t know a damn thing about this, and the local expert is going to be in a cocoon.”

I've made a token effort to restore the italics that got lost in copy-pasting, but I'm sure I missed some. Anyway, one of the things I enjoyed about writing Misha in this story was what a worrywart he turned into at this point. I always write Misha as very deflective and emotionally evasive (and when he does talk about his feelings, unless you catch him off guard, it's all very organized: it's stuff he's thought about a thousand times, dealt with, arranged neatly, probably put into words ahead of time, because he's terrified of vulnerability), but also absolutely determined to take care of the people around him as best he can. Which in this case just means waiting, which he hates.

“It starts to—” Jared sighed, and considered just going back to sleep instead of exerting himself to explain. “It starts to crumble off when it’s ready to go. You’ll be able to see it. But I need hard vacuum to get the inner layers off. Harder than you can make by just cycling an airlock. You have to open the outer gate.”

“Damn it.”

“I could hear you thinking it.”

“Don’t get smart while you’re at my mercy.” Collins seemed to stand back and survey him, though given that Jared could see him only blurrily, he could really have been doing anything. It was probably for the best that he didn’t know that. “Okay, this isn’t going to work.”

“Nuh,” Jared said helpfully.

Oh yeah, I really evoked the feeling of the second or third day of a cold. Specifically the cold I have right now. I call what Jared is experiencing here "Wednesday". Y'all are just going to have to take my word for it.

“Not in the Face remote command authorization Collins six eight three,” Collins said into his lapel. “Gravity to point one gee, thirty second onset. Execute.”

I know I've mentioned this elsewhere, but the name of the ship is from The Tick via the hilarious tuisinthekowhai. I solicited people for a name pretty late in the writing of this story, but the reason nobody acknowledges the name in the text is just that the joke is that no one questions it anymore, not that I didn't have time to work it in.

Anyway, science fiction is awesome because when you're looking down the barrel of having to write one of your characters wrangling the sodden, sticky body of the other one down a ladder and along several corridors, you can instead just have the first character turn down the gravity.

Misha loves his ship and they get along very well, but the first time after the retro-fit that he flew her from port to port he spent the entire time terrified that she was going to explode. This did not happen.

Jared was drowsily unable to extract any meaning from this, and had decided to just ignore it when he felt the ship’s artificial gravity well flex and the weight lift slowly from his limbs. He could feel the forward-and-back slewing of the Not in the Face’s center of mass more clearly now, and it made him glad there was nothing in his stomach.

It doesn't come up in this paragraph, but to Jared ships are "it", not "she", even when they're female-shaped. What I don't know is if this "it" (presumably being translated from whatever language Jared speaks) refers to inanimate objects or to a gender Jared's species has and humans don't. They definitely have at least three sexes and all of them are involved in reproduction. Also, communal child-rearing is common. They're a gregarious species, because they evolved in an environment of constant extreme peril, though before they encountered humans I don't think they tended to settle in groups of more than a couple of hundred.

“That’s more like it,” Collins said, and got an arm under Jared. Jared came unstuck in a dozen places at once when Collins lifted him; he managed a horrified whimper, and Collins froze. “Am I hurting you?”

“Feels gross,” Jared said. “Everything’s — my nerves — ugh.”

Aw, Misha, you're a not altogether terrible space boyfriend. So, oxygen!

I refer to breath mosses and their mechanical equivalent, oxygen stations, in the story, and also mention that one of the functions of Jared's wing membranes is to hold the air in over his hypothetical family. Obviously this would never work; if you dump some gasses into vacuum they just dissipate too quickly for you to get any use out of them. Breath mosses, which are the foundation of the ecosystem in which Jared's people evolved, must produce air that is somehow sticky and clingy, or polymerized or something, to keep it from just flying off into the void and never being heard from again.

That's all. It's been nagging at me for a year that I never mentioned that some handwavium was clearly necessary in this area, and I wanted to set the record straight. Ta!

[snickfic]

LADIES. Jared/Gen. Thoughtful, awesome takes on crack. :)

AWWWW. Coming from you, that last is HIGHEST PRAISE. But those other things also make me happy. :)

[snickfic]

You'd get all the boys pregnant.

Er, yes. Sorry about that, guys.

(Upon further discussion, Ghost allows that I might be doing this via, say, a vial ~accidentally knocked into a tureen of soup, rather than by direct physical contact. I must say this does seem more likely.)

[architeuthism]

Fear, Money, Zoo!

Fear: arthropods, with a few exceptions; public humiliation; and I have trypophobia (not exactly a fear), to which my responses are exacerbated by some neurological shit I've got going on. This puts me in a weird situation where -- a couple of horror blogs I follow tag for trypophobia, which is very kind of them and I'm sure is great for other people, but I'm bothered by only very specific patterns and types of holes, whereas references to trypophobia will cause me to think about those patterns and types of holes, so I wind up being triggered by posts I wouldn't have batted an eye at ordinarily. OKAY MOVING ON TO THE NEXT PARAGRAPH WHY DO I DO THESE THINGS TO MYSELF--Money: Quit my job and use it as startup money for a business.Zoo: I can't believe you would ask me this question. Okay, setting aside the obvious stuff, I think birds in general are incredibly interesting. And I was really preoccupied with orcas as a kid, probably because they are incredibly pretty horrifying murderous fucks.

[hellotrickster]

ghostyouknow27 replied to your post: I wish Tumblr had a third option, aside from likes...

I have recently started to use likes as bookmarks, because otherwise I’ll forget that I saw that .gif set two months ago, and that it’s in my queue. I like to use my brain as my only organizer, but it’s not as effective as I want to think it is.

Exactly.  For awhile there I just kept everything open in tabs and — sitting with a hundred tabs because it's a recipe you're planning to use later in the day or you're forming a reply to some post is not feasible, especially if you've hit reblog and Tumblr is trying to load the dash in the background.  UGH.

[snickfic]

ghostyouknow27 replied to your post: Megstiel: So Much Babyfic, So Little Mpreg or In...

I think Id forgotten what its like to ship a het pairing that other people ship as well. Only my reaction is less, Wheres the mpreg? and more WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO THE BADASS LADY!? STOP IT. STOP IT NOW.

ALSO A VALID RESPONSE.