So I am a little behind with this, I know. But this past week/weekend I was finally able to finish The Originals s5 and the first season of Legacies. This is also your SPOILER WARNING.
Holy wow, Batman.
I mean we knew that things were going to be bad after the way that s4 ended and to know that there was going to be a time skip on top of this being the last season of Originals? The showrunners aren’t exactly known for their happily ever afters. So I was already braced for things to get deep down and dirtier than even what we’d seen before. The show did not disappoint there and neither did the cast.
The amount of emotion that each of them put into every moment was fantastic and it was a good way to send the show off. Certain moments had me sniffling into the couch. It was a really fascinating look at the different factions and how far they’d come since the beginning and how far certain characters had come.
One of my favorite moments is when Vincent marshalls the New Orleans coven and gets rid of the Ancestral Well, putting all the Ancestors to peace at last, and letting go of that power sink. It was a good moment for him and the right decision if the coven wanted to move ahead.
While I hated losing some of the characters that I really loved, it was a good send off to see Klaus and Elijah going out on their own terms together. And for New Orleans to really recover/bounce back from the faction wars between the big 3 and then between the Mikaelsons and the very Nazi-esque faction of blood purists – the Mikaelson vampires needed to go as well. Klaus and Elijah are gone, Rebecca is marrying Marcel after she takes the cure and becomes human so she’ll eventually pass on. Marcel may or may not follow her. Kol is married to Davina and may well follow her when she eventually dies. Freya is human and while powerful, she’s not immortal. So with the Originals sorted out and Hope going back to the Salvatore School…it was the perfect tee-up to the first season of Legacies.
Legacies takes a look at the next generation with Hope Mikaelson , Josie and Lizzie Saltzman (yes those twins) and others. It’s a season about hard decisions and their consequences and like the title tells you, the legacies that get passed down from parent to child. We get to meet some amazing new characters and see exactly who and what and how things happen in a world post-TVD and TO. It also explains a little more about certain plot threads from The Originals and TVD.
It’s August. Which means that con prep has shifted into high gear(as of the writing of this blog post, I have 23 days, 5 hours, and 33 minutes according to the countdown on the con website .)
I have my tentative panel schedule and it looks awesome. Of course, with it comes a fair bit of homework. Pleasurable homework – this year it’s rewatching/finishing 4 seasons of TV, rereading two books, and writing an updated workshop as well.
You know, in addition to my day job, writing the novel, and also working on Patreon things.
It’s going to be Crazy Pants McGee here in the Hobbit House that Nerd Built which is just the way we like it (it’s also the reason we take September off to recover).
I’ll post sneak peeks of my schedule throughout the month so you can see some of the awesome fun stuff I’ll be doing over Labor Day weekend.
Hopefully I’ll see some of you there as well! I’m in the program and on the website under my Muggle name. I’ll be in the app too as soon as this year’s version gets released.
When you know you’ve made it – this is a question that I get a lot at various panels and workshops that I do. I know that it’s also something that several of my colleagues get asked often.
So how DO you know when you’ve “made it” in your chosen field or genre? This, just like the majority of the writing advice you’ll encounter online and offline is subjective. It depends on who you are asking and what they’re using as their goalposts.
It could be awards or recognition of your works at a national/international level, it could be when you’re invited to a convention or conference as a guest instead of program participant. Those are fairly common ones. So is making one of the NY Bestselling Lists. These goalposts can be huge or small – it all depends on the person(s) involved.
For me, personally, I grew up with fandom during the late 90’s/early 2000’s. The earliest LiveJournal posts I have were back in 2004 and I remember an Internet where finding fanfic meant toggling between locked Yahoo Groups, Fanfiction.net, Fiction Alley, and a thousand other Geocities or Angelfire websites. All of it depending on the fandoms you were in and the easiest way to find good fic was rec lists on Live Journal rec comms. Some fandoms had hundreds of thousands of fansites; others had two (maybe).
I am never-endingly thankful that Archive of Our Own (A03) exists is what I’m getting at here. And it ties into my own “made it” milestone. I will officially consider myself to have “made it” when there’s an A03 fandom tag for my works and it’s Yuletide eligible.
Everything else mentioned before would be awesome, don’t get me wrong. Winning a Hugo or Nebula would just blow my socks off, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. Hitting a bestseller list would make me squee (high pitched dolphin noises) for weeks, if not months. Someone cosplaying as one of the characters in my stories would have me blinding people with the sunshiny smile on my face.
But to be Yuletide eligible and have an A03 fandom tag created for fanworks of my writing? That’s my gold standard right there.
So if you’re a writer/creator, what’s your “made it” moment? Share it in the comments if you like. I love hearing about them from other creatives.
It’s been a interesting weekend. Hypericon was this weekend and even though I technically wasn’t a formal guest, I wound up moderating three panels anyways. Occupational hazard, especially when you’re also staff at the con.
On one of them, the topic of beta-readers and alpha-readers came up and I learned something interesting. Not everyone treats them the same way or as the same thing.
I grew up in fandom and my understanding has always been that a beta-reader is someone that helps you during your developmental phase before you hit the copy-edits and proofreading. Alpha-readers on the other hand are people that help you catch whatever last typos and kind of serve as a preliminary ARC reader.
Some of the people on the panel don’t have both or what they call a beta-reader is more like my understanding of an alpha-reader. Some of them will use betas during the copy-edit phase. Some people don’t use them at all, just working with their editor.
Please don’t misunderstand me, editors are fundamentally crucial to the writing for publication process. However, I have also found it helpful in a lot of cases with some of my writing to also use beta-readers – I find them really helpful.
So I thought I’d open up this question to any of the other creatives out there. What about you? Do you use beta-readers or alpha-readers? Some of them, both of them, or none? Leave your answers in the comments and let’s chat about this.
So last month was kind of a hell of a month for several reasons. I had found out that I was being laid off from my job at the beginning of April and so was the rest of my department. The next three weeks were taken up with interviews, applications, and making sure everything at my day job didn’t suffer from my highly distracted focus. It’s important in customer service to make sure of things like that.
As luck and a whole lot of prayers and well wishes would have it, I landed a great job at the end of April and I started it May 13th. Training went amazing and now I’m deep into the thick of and loving every minute. I miss my old coworkers but we’d been seeing this coming for a while. We just didn’t know when. The adjustment period has been better and certainly shorter than the last time I switched jobs. However, between that and some other family shenanigans going down, it’s left me pretty drained and kind of brainless. Exhaustion is the eater of creativity and weakener of walls against depression. So it’s been recuperationville for me a lot the past month.
This month, however, I’m working to get back in the swing of things. So there will be more frequent posting and some actual reviews from the media I’ve seen recently and also some of the books I’ve been reading.
Today is Phantom Menace day. 20 years ago today is when the first of the prequel trilogy of Star Wars was released and a whole new wave of Star Wars fervor swept the world. It was the first new Star Wars movie since 1983. The excitement was beyond huge.
It was also the movie that saved me.
Let me set the stage for you. In May of 1999, I was 12 years old, an undiagnosed autistic kid dealing with a whole lot of sensory overload as well as mental overload because I was in a foreign country trying to figure which way was up. I had help with it, but there was also a lot I couldn’t get help with yet because I simply did not know how to ask for it or even verbalize what was going on in my head. It was the late 90’s and literally no person would have looked at me and known that I was on the ASD spectrum. I was female and what they called high-functioning and no one who didn’t see me in the middle of a full-on sensory meltdown would have even guessed that’s what was up with me.
I was also a former army brat who was extremely resentful that after having started to put down roots and double checked that we weren’t planning on moving and that I could quite possibly not actually have to be the new kid for once, that I could go to middle school with all of the rest of my friends and yearmates…and then before I could even blink, we were in the process of moving again. And not just across the US but to a completely foreign country on the other side of the equator.
Because of all of that, I retreated inward a lot. Stuck to my books and my games and what internet access I was allowed to have. Talked when I was spoken to mostly or when I knew it would be expected of me. Didn’t bother otherwise.
The one thing I did know was that I loved science fiction. I’d been raised on Star Trek and Babylon 5 but hadn’t been introduced to Star Wars until I’d asked my dad a question after hearing some boys on the bus talk about it. He realized that no, he hadn’t shown us that, and that day went out to buy the trilogy on VHS. We spent the weekend watching them and it was the gateway to this fabulous new world full of adventures and terrifying villains and where the smartest hero was the girl and it was pretty brilliant all around. My tiny 9 year old self was blown away. It wasn’t long before I was asking to rewatch them or if they knew anything more after the end of Return of the Jedi?
At 10, I found and proceeded to beg and plead and bargain for my mother to buy me this book I found that was all Star Wars in the book section of Kroger. It was Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Crystal Star and my mind was blown open again by the fact that here were my heroes 10 years on, still alive and thriving, and OMG they had kids!!
Fast forward back to 1999, the only real thing that to use my parents’ term, “brought me out of my shell” was the fact that there was a new Star Wars movie coming out and I HAD to see it. Any thoughts I’d had on running away and calling my grandmother to please come get me (I had an international calling card in my possession) because I didn’t want to be here or doing something else drastic completely faded away because there was a new Star Wars movie coming out and I had to see it. Which meant I had to stay where the money and the transportation were. I also had to be GOOD so that they’d take me to it. The desire to see the movie overrode every other thing in my brain.
Even better was the fact that at my local theater there, it wasn’t dubbed. It was subtitled instead and that meant that I could go to see it and not miss anything because my language skills still weren’t super great.
And it was exactly what I needed and more. It gave me the Jedi and Anakin as a small thing and podracing and complicated political measures and a Queen and her handmaidens who were close to my age and being the most incredible capable awesome GIRLS ever. It gave me new depths to the universe I was already in love with and new characters to fall in love with or hate desperately from the bottom of my heart (Darth Maul killing Qui-Gon had me seething in my seat). I saw it four times in theaters and only one of those times was with my parents. I totally wrangled movie funds out of them for doing all manner of chores and homework and whatever. There were a bunch of kids in the neighborhood we were living in at the time and I’m pretty sure we all convinced their parents at one time or another to drop us off at the theater to go see the movie again and again.
By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40390381
Best of all, it was part one and that meant there were more coming and that meant I had to do whatever I needed to so that I could be there to watch them.
Later on, I went through that phase where everyone hated on it and disparaged it and made jokes about it and I ceded to the peer pressure then but deep down I never forgot that before I had antidepressants, before I even knew about sensory overload and major depression disorder and generalized anxiety disorder…I had Star Wars. And that was enough at the time.
Without The Phantom Menace coming out in theaters today 20 years ago, I don’t honestly know if I would still be here or not. Because of it and Star Wars, I have met some of the absolute best people in the world, I have friendships that I wouldn’t have had without it, and life is super awesome being the Star Wars nerd that I am.
There are certain books that, for lack of a better term, leave a mark on you after you finish them. They become demarcation points in your life, in that there was you before you read it and then the you after you read it is different. Maybe it’s the way you see yourself or the way the sky seems a bit bluer, but that book changed you in some way.
The Three-Body Problem did this for me, as you all probably know, I read a lot. And I read across multiple disciplines and genres because I like learning and I adore stuff that really makes me think. This year, I’m making a concerted effort to go through all the rec lists and my ever-growing To Be Read pile and that’s where the 2019 Reading Challenge came from. Someone in the Books-A-Million where my Darling Roommate works had bought it and recommended it to me and so when my library had a copy, I picked it up (All Hail the person/people who came up with Overdrive). Once I started it, I couldn’t put it down. It pulled me in and wouldn’t let go, almost mesmerizing me with the beauty and the starkness it conveys.
To know that this book is also a translation makes me breathless because having lived part of my life overseas from my native country, I know exactly how hard that is and how much can get lost in translation, if you’re not careful. It makes this book doubly wonderful for me.
The Three-Body Problem is set against the backdrop of China’s Cultural Revolution , a secret military base sends out signals in order to establish contact with aliens. An alien civilization receives the signal and plots to invade Earth. What happens next is predictable to a point – different camps start forming. Those in favor of the invasion and those that are not. That’s where any and all predictability ends. The way that the story is told unfolds the tale of what has happened and how the different camps came to be in such a masterful way. This book, which is book one of three, which is something I didn’t realize until I’d finished it, is one that makes you really stop and think and it blew me away.
I’ll be sitting with this one for a while. If you have the opportunity, I highly recommend this book.
In cleaning out my bookmarks folders (something that I occasionally do in order to prune out all the dead links) I happened upon several things that I had been meaning to actually do a blog post on, but life intervened and for one reason or another, it never happened.
Given that 2019 is my year for kindness (radical, reckless kindness for both others and myself) and acknowledging that my life is no less crazy than it was back then, so the likelihood of each of these getting said blog post is slim to none. I resolved instead to put them some of them here as a kind of link roundup ( to put all of them would make this post long in all the bad ways so I’m breaking them up into chunks).
Hunger Makes Me – this piece threw me for a loop when I first read it. My emotional response to it was overwhelming and complicated. Overall, it was an excellent piece. CW: does lightly reference eating disorders and dieting.
It is always interesting to watch action movies when you are a child of the military-industrial complex. Growing up on military bases and in and around the DC-Metro area makes its mark on you. It’s a little weird to describe sometimes, but by both deliberate training and general osmosis, you become a little more sensitive to a whole host of things. You tend to notice different things that civilians don’t always pick up on.
So you pick up on a lot really quickly, because that’s a thing that keeps you alive in the real world, but those skills also transfer over to movie watching.
Especially action/adventure/spy movies (or shows). Which all of us have love/hate relationships with and none of us can actually stop watching them. It’s almost a game to spot the mole or spot that one flaw that is going to be SUPER critical in 5,4,3,2, now.
It gets even creepier when the thing takes place somewhere you know well. Winter Soldier is one of the finest pieces of action cinema that I’ve seen and it’s also one of the most chilling simply because I know that city and that terrain pretty intimately.
Olympus Has Fallen was literally breathtaking, not just because of the premise (which was terrifying on its own) but because of the response times. The little details in that film had some family members dissecting it and how it couldn’t work like that in real life for their own peace of mind.
MI-5/Spooks had some episodes that were similar in nature. The ones that were just a little too realistic and had us squirming uncomfortably on the couch because “there but for the Grace of God go I.”
The reason this thought came about was because my AR (Awesome Roomie) and I were watching an action movie (Stratton on Amazon Prime, I definitely recommend it) because I love action movies and she loves Tyler Hoechlin and we were both having audible reactions to some of it for really different reasons.
So which action movies/shows are your favorite? Let me know in the comments!
So this is a thing I love a lot. Sound The Bells by Dessa set to PacRim clips, telling a gorgeous story conveyed through exquisite craftsmanship.
In the past couple of weeks, my day job has been rather more intense than normal, which was expected (there’s a reason we refer to it as the year end deathmarch) so I’ve been laying low in my off hours. It was not exactly a stellar year and I’m closer to actual burnout than I want to be. So it’s time to read and rest and refresh myself. Part of that is going back to some of my favorite things. Things that make me happy. I’ve been kicking around fandom for longer than I care to admit and one of the things that I love the most is the boundless creativity that springs up from it.
One of my friends linked the above video ages ago and I had to click on it – a fanvid set to one of my favorite songs using one of my favorite movies? It was a gift. I keep coming back to it too. The transitions are beautiful and the song pairs so well with the movie clips and even if you know nothing about the movie, you still get a great experience out of watching this video. It’s delightful artwork and it reminds me that fandom is supposed to be fun and it’s supposed to bring you joy in what you love.
